Calling All Mothers: Baby Food Essentials You Need In Your Store Cupboard

Weaning a baby off breast milk can seem like a massive ordeal - more so for the parent than the child, usually. Asking a living, breathing being to give up the only diet that it has ever known, and suddenly replace it with regular foods seems like it would take a massive toll on the body. And in some ways it does. But it is also a vital step in the developmental process. 

In this post, we’re going to take a look at all the baby food essentials you need in your family store cupboard, including some helpful backup options when breast milk is not available. 

Canned Beans

Beans have been with humanity for at least the last one hundred thousand years. People have been using them in cooking for an enormous length of time, and there’s ample evidence that we’re well adapted to eating them. 

Photo Source: Pixabay - CC0 License

Beans can cause gas in adults who rarely eat them. But that usually has more to do with the rest of their diet than the legumes themselves. Ideally, you want to get your baby started on small quantities of this superfood as early as you can. It’ll help populate their guts with the type of bacteria that they need to thrive in the future.

Formula Milk 

You don’t have to immediately move your baby completely away from milk onto regular food in one fell swoop. Most parents keep a stock of formula milk on standby, just in case transitioning to a regular diet proves difficult. If you’re not sure how to prepare milk, then this Holle preparation guide can guide you through the process.

Dried Fruits

Photo Source: Pixabay - CC0 License

Feeding young children refined sugar is probably a bad idea. It mucks with their taste buds and rewards centers in the brain. And it leads to tooth decay, which can harm adult teeth as well as the baby variety. 

Kids, though, love sweetness. So what’s the solution?

The best approach is to use dried fruits. These have the sweetness of regular sugar, but they don’t appear to hijack the brain or cause caries. 

Quick-Cook Grains

Photo Source: Pixabay - CC0 License

If you go back thousands of years, you find that most cultures based their diets almost exclusively around grains. No wonder we can’t get enough of them today!

Grains, however, can be both good and bad. Good grains are those that are in the same form as they came off the plant - so brown rice and quinoa. Bad grains are those that mills grind into white flours and turn into pastries. Avoid these!

You can keep dried grains for months in the pantry, so you’ll always have stock available, ready, and raring to go. 

Canned Tomatoes

What was the first thing to run out when the Coronavirus hit, and everyone had to start cooking from home? It was canned tomatoes. This ingredient seems to be a part of practically every recipe on the planet. It’s also vital for babies because it gets their bodies used to nightshades, which can cause problems later on in life without early exposure.