Batch Cooking: 4 BLW Foods You Can Make Ahead of Time

Katie Ferraro (0s):

And the thing about the pork butt or the pork shoulder roast is that it makes a ton of meat at a very affordable price. Those nice, soft shreddable strips of meat that are safe for babies to eat. It's a fatty cut of meat so it's safer for them to swallow. Plus it makes a ton so you can freeze it and use it later. Hey there! I'm Katie Ferraro, Registered Dietitian, college nutrition professor, and mom of seven specializing in baby-led weaning. Here on the Baby-Led Weaning Made Easy podcast, I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, leaving you with the confidence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby-led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (41s):

Let's talk about batch cooking. Do you guys do it? Like meal prepping and making all your food ahead of time so that when you are hungry or your baby's hungry or you're in a hurry, you just look in your fridge or your freezer and all the food is magically there? No, me neither. I have great aspirations of wanting to do that. I actually recently went on a trip with my husband. It was our 10 year anniversary, so we went to Italy for a week and it was the first time we'd been on vacation by ourselves in 10 years since our honeymoon actually. And before I left, I have two team members, Lauren and Katelynn, who work with me and they said, "You're not going to work for a week, but in order to do that, you have to do all these things." And they made me a list and I am a notorious procrastinator, but because I really, really wanted to go on vacation and not think about work, I actually batched all of my work.

Katie Ferraro (1m 28s):

Like in a perfect world, I would batch all my podcast episodes, batch all my emails that I send you guys, batch, all our YouTube videos. And then in real life I'm, like everyone I hope, doing everything last minute. But it felt so good to actually batch my work and get it out of the way. And then even today, I don't know why. Well, we're going on a work retreat. That's why Lauren, Katelynn and I are a meeting to do a planning retreat for next year. And I had to leave the house a little bit earlier and I actually got up early, made my kids lunches, made the breakfast, and got the dinner ready for babysitter since I was going to be gone all day. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, this batching thing is totally worth doing." Like everyone talks about it and when I do it, it's like when you exercise you're like, "Oh, that feels so good I know I should do it more often."

Katie Ferraro (2m 11s):

Same thing with batching. So I had had this episode planned, which is about batch cooking and four baby-led weaning foods that you can make ahead of time. I always want to batch foods. And to be honest, when babies come over and I'm working with babies, I actually do make all the food ahead of time because there's a very precious small window of time where a baby, who's just starting out on solid foods, would actually be interested in eating and I want to be totally present for that to help the mom and the dad, the caregiver. So I like to have the food prepped ahead of time, but like in real life, half the time I don't even have my kids dinner made ahead of time. So I understand the benefits of batching. I know that some of you may be significantly more organized than me. So I want to share four really, really easy recipe ideas of foods for baby-led weaning that you can make ahead of time.

Katie Ferraro (2m 55s):

And so what I tried to do was pick one food from each of the categories in my 100 First Foods list–there are five categories. So I have a five step feeding framework where we introduce five new foods per week and choose these foods off of my original 100 First Foods list. So on Monday we do a new fruit, Tuesday a new vegetable, Wednesday a new starchy food, Thursday a new protein food, and Friday is one of the allergenic foods. So I've chosen four foods, one of them is kind of a combo food, but you could certainly feed it early on in phase one of baby-led weaning. And those are the ones I want to share with you today. If you want to get the actual recipes for these–so if you are on my email list, every Sunday I send out a weekly roundup email that has a new baby-led weaning recipe of the week.

Katie Ferraro (3m 35s):

So if you want to get the recipes, check the link where you're listening to this episode. It'll be in the show notes where you can sign up for the email list and get these recipes sent to you. I also have a hundred different baby-led weaning recipes inside of my program, The Self-Feeding Baby, and I introduce that to everyone on my free workshop, which is called Baby-Led Weaning for Beginners. So if you haven't taken that free one hour workshop, that's where you get my 100 First Foods list. That's where you can learn more about joining the program with all of these recipes. But if you just want to get free recipes, they're inside of the weekly email. And if you want to sign up for this weeks workshop times, that's at babyledweaning.co or again, it'll be linked up wherever you are listening to this. So with no further ado, here are four baby-led weaning foods you can make ahead of time.

Katie Ferraro (4m 16s):

The first one is a make ahead pancake waffle batter. So I love pancakes and I love waffles because kids need carbohydrates. However, commercial pancake and waffle mixes have way too much sodium in them for babies, and then a lot of times they have added sugar. So you guys may be aware, but the recommendation is no added sugar for children up until age two. And we really want to minimize sodium. So my general rule of thumb is for packaged foods, I look for less than a hundred milligrams of sodium per serving. It's almost impossible to find that. It is impossible to find that in a commercial pre-made pancake mix. So I have this amazing recipe, it's adapted from King Arthur, the flour company. They had a whole grain pancake. It's like a double-duty batter mix. So it's like you make the dry mix, you can make waffles or pancakes out of it.

Katie Ferraro (4m 58s):

This recipe is so amazing because it has whole wheat flour and it has oatmeal in it, it has regular flour in it. There is some baking soda, so there's a little bit of sodium. But when you spread it out across all of the servings that it makes, it's much, much, much lower in sodium and certainly at a level that I feel comfortable to serve babies. So the way this batter or the batter mix makes, I say batter, but it's really a powder, like a dry mix, right? Like you would take out of a bag like Bisquick but without all the sodium and other junk in it. And you can make it ahead of time. So you mix up all the ingredients. It makes a ton. I mean we have seven kids and I probably only have to make this like once a week. For less children, you would probably have to only make this once a month. And then you take one cup of this dry mix, you mix it with one egg and one cup of buttermilk. And then the ratio is a little bit different if you're doing waffles versus pancakes.

Katie Ferraro (5m 41s):

But then you can use that as a medium to try all sorts of other new foods. Like if you're doing pumpkin for example, you can mix some canned pumpkin puree into the mix in place of some of the liquid. So it's very, very, very versatile. Hey, we're going to take a quick break, but I'll be right back.

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Katie Ferraro (6m 34s):

I actually have a blog post with this particular recipe in it that I'll link to that in the show notes for this episode. If you go to blwpodcast.com/279, that's where you kind of find out where to get all these recipes. But if you do pancakes and waffles, sometimes it can be a little bit on the dry side. I like this particular recipe because there's actually a cup of oil in the dry mix. It throws everyone for a loop. They're like, "How are you calling it a dry mix if it has oil in it?" I don't know, it works. You can also keep it in your cabinet for up to a month. I prefer to refrigerate it just because anytime something has oil in it, like the fat could potentially go rancid, it could go bad faster. So I take the dry mix, I put it in an airtight container, I put it in my fridge. Whenever you need pancakes, you just take a cup of that dry mix, a cup of buttermilk, one egg, and whatever else you want to throw in there.

Katie Ferraro (7m 16s):

But for your early eaters, if you feel it's a little bit on the dry side, I normally will top pancakes and waffles with ricotta cheese. So ricotta cheese is a nice low sodium cheese; I use it as a dipper or a topper. It's kind of a way to soften or moisten up the foods that makes it then safer for your earlier eater to eat. So that's number one, a make ahead pancake waffle better. Great way to get some good whole grain carbohydrates into your baby for breakfast. That doesn't take a ton of time to prepare. Alright, next up, I love to batch cook zucchini egg cups. This is one of my favorite recipes. We do this one on Instagram a lot and always gets a lot of love because it's kind of hard to offer vegetables at breakfast, right? Like think about your typical breakfast. How often are you really eating vegetables? And we talk about the importance of offering babies as many vegetable offerings as we do fruit offerings.

Katie Ferraro (8m 0s):

And sometimes like at breakfast, I'm going to default to fruit because it's easier, but we don't want to get in the habit of always offering fruit. So I love these zucchini egg cup muffins because they incorporate a vegetable but they also incorporate egg, which is one of the allergenic foods. So in my program we start introducing one new allergenic food per week, every week beginning in week one of baby-led weaning and egg milk and peanut because they're the three most common pediatric food allergies. It's easy to start with those. You definitely don't have to, but if you do egg a number of times and your baby doesn't have a reaction, okay, you know your baby is good with egg, you've tried a couple different textures. Making a baked egg cup, or a lot of them, that you can then freeze or refrigerate extras for is a great way, especially for breakfast, to have some protein. And honestly you can serve any of these foods any time of day.

Katie Ferraro (8m 42s):

That's the best thing about babies, right? They don't care if you offer them lamb and potatoes for breakfast. They don't know the difference. But with the zucchini egg cup, kind of a twist on that, sometimes I make them in muffin tins or mini muffin tins. That's a lot of dishes though, sometimes greasing all the pans and cleaning them is sometimes a pain. I've increasingly been cooking, anything I used to make in a muffin tin, I now make in a mini loaf pan. So it's a rectangular tin, kind of like a muffin tin, but it's a little bit larger. And if you make it in a rectangular shape when it's done and cools, you can cut it into strips about the size of your adult pinky finger. That's then the perfect size for baby-led weaning for your baby to pick up that food and serve it to themselves. With the circular muffin, if you're cutting it into strips, you kinda lose some of the scraps on the end.

Katie Ferraro (9m 23s):

I personally eat them, but it's a little bit cleaner to do the loaf pan. So that's definitely been kind of a game changer for me and my baby-led weaning kitchen as I work on all these recipes for you guys. Third food that's pretty easy to batch cook–cinnamon poached apples. Now, a lot of times people will say, "Katie, but apples are one of the biggest choking hazard foods." Yes, they definitely are. We never serve babies raw, crunchy or crispy apples. Okay, if you look at the emergency department admission data for nonfatal choking incidences in pediatrics, yeah the obvious foods are up there that are like risk factors, you know, popcorn and hard candies, but you're not feeding those foods to your babies. But you would be surprised how many people do feed apples to their babies. So people say, "Well you can't feed apples." Well you can feed apples, you just need to make them safe.

Katie Ferraro (10m 3s):

And so the way I do that is by coring the apple, peeling it. And then I slice it and then I poach it in a little bit of water until it gets fork tender, cool it, and then add some cinnamon or cumin. But like if you're doing one apple, you might as well do 10 apples is the way I feel. Now obviously if you keep cooking the apples, then they turn into apple sauce, which is a great no sugar added apple sauce that you can use for your baby to practice with a preloaded spoon. But those cinnamon poached apples, they're not a pain. I mean, okay, it's kind of a pain to peel an apple and core an apple. I actually use an apple corer, that's my little hack there. Either an eight slice or 16 slice apple corer, get one on Amazon. Total game changer. I don't have excellent knife skills so I kind of need like the other cutting tools to help me out.

Katie Ferraro (10m 43s):

But I love an apple corer. You can do a whole bushel of apples or a peck or a bag, whatever you prefer to make a lot of these at one time and they actually freeze pretty well, also. So you can make apple sauce out of them, you can have extra apples. It's just nice to kind of have a soft ripe fruit ready to go because you know with fruit like you buy and you're like, "Oh crap, it's not ready yet." If the apples have been prepped, they'll always be ready for you. Alright, the last food that I always batch cook ahead of time–pork, pork shoulder or pork butt roast. Okay? So if you've been following any of my content, you know that the most important thing about serving your baby meat, which is a wonderful source of iron and great texture and taste, flavor, opportunity for your baby. But we need to make soft, shreddable strips of meat. So I always say, "If you can shred the meat between your finger and your thumb, then it's safe for your baby to eat with their gums."

Katie Ferraro (11m 26s):

The problem is, solid pieces of meat like pork chops or pieces of steak, you can't shred those with your finger and your thumb. That's not safe for your baby to eat with their gums. So we want those soft, shreddable cuts of meat. I've done a lot of content on the podcast about how to make red meat safe for babies to eat, how to make white meat safe for babies to eat. When it comes to the easiest meat to make, like literally set it and forget it, plus it's also affordable, plus it's a super fatty cut that's really nice and moist and safe for babies to eat– I love pork shoulder or pork butt. We're going to take a quick break, but I'll be right back.

Katie Ferraro (12m 7s):

So I'll always get a pork shoulder or pork butt roast. I don't know if you guys remember this episode, but we had a butcher on the podcast a while ago. She was so cool. Cara Nicoletti and she's from New York, she's a third generation butcher and she came on to kind of walk us through the meat counter. So that was back in episode 176. It was called BLW at the Butcher Identifying Ideal Cuts of Meat for Babies with fourth generation Butcher, Cara Nicoletti. So she's fourth generation, not third generation, sorry. I was asking her like why is the same cut of pork like the pork shoulder, pork butt roast like called so many different things like it's a Boston butt if you live in the northeast. Just kind of just like regional differences and there's some slight variations. But the point is if you get a fatty cut and a roast from a pig, you're going to get nice soft shreddable pieces of meat because there's so much fat in there.

Katie Ferraro (12m 53s):

So the way I do the pork shoulder, cause it makes a lot, I used get Butcher Box all the time. My freezer got too full of meat so I had to stop my subscription, but they had a wonderful pork butt, but it's also very affordable, ubiquitous cut of meat. If you are not into buying big chunks of meat, this is like a good starter meat for you guys. You literally put it in your instant pot or your slow cooker, put about four cups of no added salt both, beef or chicken or vegetable, whatever you want. You can slow cook it. I usually do it for about 8 to 10 hours on high depending upon how many pounds it is. Or you can pressure cook it, which is even faster because I'm never organized enough to be 8 or 10 hours ahead of when I want the food to be ready. But it performs really wonderful and it again, that fat liquefies, it kind of coats those protein strands.

Katie Ferraro (13m 34s):

You can make longer strips about the size of your adult pinky finger that the baby can pick up and eat. Plus it makes a ton. So you can take little chunks of it. I kind of pick off the gristle, I pick off any solid fat that's left and just have the strips of meat and then portion out little balls that I'll put into like an airtight container and then I separate it with wax paper or parchment paper. So then they kind of freeze like individual portions of meat, a couple ounces, one or two ounces and then you can just kind of snap off the amount that you want and defrost it. Because like obviously you're not going to make pork butt every day for your baby, but you are going to want to introduce them to meat, you know, regularly as a way to get them experienced and proficient with that texture, but also have all of that amazing iron and zinc that we know comes in animal foods and save yourself a ton of time.

Katie Ferraro (14m 15s):

You don't have to cook meat every day. So we make carnitas a lot using, I'll use the my baby-led weaning pork butt recipe and then I roast or I'll broil them. I know some people fry their carnitas, but it's too messy for me. So then I'll take the rest of it for the rest of the family and broil it and make it nice and crispy so we can have caritas. But because we don't offer crispy or crunchy foods to babies, I just pull the amount for the baby that I want ahead of time and then make the nice crispy crunchy ones for us. And then add some salt for the adults as well. So there's enough for us. And then a ton left over and then some to freeze. It's a way, you know, sometimes a pork butt costs less than $10. It's a way to get a lot of portions of meat for a pretty affordable price and in a way that you can store extras so you don't have to be making these foods all the time.

Katie Ferraro (14m 57s):

So I hope you enjoyed learning quickly about four different baby-led weaning foods you can make ahead of time. I'll link where you can sign up for the email list if you want to get my weekly Sunday email with my weekly BLW recipe. I'll also share where that make ahead pancake and waffle batter article is. So you can copy that recipe if you want it. If you follow me on Instagram @babyledweanteam, we do a couple recipes a week and you can save those, screenshot them, share them, whatever you want, so you can make those recipes. And if you come to the free Baby-Led weaning for Beginners workshop, that's where you get the 100 First Foods list with a lot more tips on how to make foods safe for baby-led weaning. And that's at babyledweaning.co. Again, everything will be linked up for this episode on the show notes, which you can find at blwpodcast.com/279.

Katie Ferraro (15m 42s):

Thank you so much for listening. And I also wanted to say thank you to our network partners at AirWave Media. If you like Podcasts that feature science, food, and using your brain, definitely check out AirWave Media for some amazing audio experiences. My podcast home again is at blwpodcast.com and I'll see you guys next time. Happy feeding.