Microwave Cooking for Your Baby & Child: The A B C's of Creating Quick, Nutritious Meals for Little Ones: A Cookbook
240
Microwave Cooking for Your Baby & Child: The A B C's of Creating Quick, Nutritious Meals for Little Ones: A Cookbook
240eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780345540584 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/05/2012 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION:
THE MICROWAVE SOLUTION
If a magic genie appeared to new parents and allowed them to create the ideal cooking system for babies and small children, I’m sure they’d come up with something fast and nutritious that involved little cleanup. Voilà, the microwave!
My husband, David, and I purchased our first microwave about six months before the birth of our daughter Sarah. We never felt the need for “instant” cooking, but with the impending change a baby would bring we thought we’d take advantage of every modern convenience. In truth we hardly used it until Sarah started to eat. Boiling a cup of water and defrosting were what I thought a microwave oven did best. I suspect I was like most cooks who just never took the time to master it.
Mothers and fathers today have many choices and decisions to make about feeding their babies. You can buy commercially prepared jars of ready-to-eat food or cans of dehydrated baby food that just need reconstituting. You can also take foods from the family table and simply purée them, or you can cook your baby’s food fresh from scratch. So how do you choose?
Your personal situation will determine how and what you feed your baby. You’ve probably already asked your pediatrician about safe feeding practices, probably read a few magazine articles on the subject, then balanced the time you have for cooking against the time you have for your husband, other children and family members, community commitments and work responsibilities. After taking into account all these considerations, you make decisions about how to feed your baby that will work for you and your family.
In many cases you’ve probably chosen a combination of feeding possibilities. If you’re traveling and don’t have a kitchen, then a jar of ready-to-eat food for your baby may work best. When the family is eating a simple meal of chicken, potatoes, and vegetables, then a quick purée in the blender works nicely. When take-out pizza is on the adult menu, making baby a meal all his own may be the solution that day. But for cooking healthy food that babies and children love, nothing beats the microwave.
When babies grow into toddlers, they can share much of what you’re serving on the adult table, and your microwave may become the primary cooking tool for all of you, or you may still just use it to prepare your child’s meals. The same qualities that make a microwave ideal for cooking small babies’ meals still apply to older children, and many mothers simply adapt their recipes to suit their child’s tastes. In this book I’ve included recipes for children from tiny babies all the way through age three, but if your children are like mine, they’ll keep asking for their favorite “baby” foods even beyond that age. And why not? The recipes are good for your preschooler or school-age child for the same reasons they’re good for your toddler. They’re low in salt, offer a lot of variety and, most of all, the recipes in Chapters 9 and Chapter 10 provide a balanced meal in one dish.
When my daughter started on solid foods, I was dissatisfied with the choices offered on supermarket shelves. I wanted her to have fresh-cooked foods and more variety. Besides being a parent like you, I am also a professional nutritionist. I counsel adults, mothers-to-be, even children and teenagers, about nutrition and diet. I feel strongly that good, healthy food served to children when they’re young helps lay the foundation for good health and eating habits when they’re grown up. So when cooking for Sarah, I did what I thought a mother was supposed to do: I steamed the vegetables and boiled the potato, baked the chicken, then ground or mashed it all up into a consistency Sarah could handle: nice, soft mush. At the end of one meal I’d have three or four dirty pans, not including the utensils or dishes she used, and I still had to cook dinner for the grown-ups. Finally, I got smart and decided to tap the resources of my microwave.
MICROWAVE COOKING AND NUTRITION
Microwave cooking is ideally suited for making your baby and child delicious meals and snacks. Cooking fast, which is what your microwave does best, retains more nutrients than slow cooking or boiling methods. A microwave cooks with little or no added liquid, and that means that no nutrients are lost or discarded in the cooking water. It also cooks fast, so nutrients are less likely to be destroyed. In fact, studies show that microwave cooking retains more vitamin C and more B vitamins—thiamine, riboflavin, pyridoxine and folic acid—than conventional cooking methods. The microwave oven also retains more flavor and color—particularly of vegetables—and this increases the chance that baby will want to eat them.
The microwave works quickly (particularly on baby-size portions), which in itself should be enough to convince you to convert to using one, and since microwave ovens cook by moist heat, the foods you cook in them will come out tender and wet, qualities that grown-ups might dislike but kids love. Remember, no matter how wholesome a dinner might be on paper, it isn’t nutritious if your baby doesn’t eat it! In the early feeding stages, when baby needs her food puréed, it is easier to do it if the foods are still juicy after cooking.
Baby stews and one-dish minicasseroles are ideally suited for baby—and for busy mothers (and fathers) who want to avoid elaborate cleanups. Since microwave cooking times are short, food doesn’t get cooked onto the dishware. The same dish can go from freezer to oven to table, making cleanup so quick you’ll hardly notice it.
The microwave has a whole host of other advantages: In the heat of summer, when you may be satisfied with just a salad, you’ll still have to make dinner for your little ones. With your microwave oven you can cook without heating up the kitchen. And when fruit such as green bananas or hard pears aren’t soft enough for baby, you can “ripen” them quickly in the microwave.
So, if all you’ve been using your microwave oven for is making tea, reheating leftovers and cooking TV dinners, you’re about to be introduced to a whole new horizon of cooking possibilities.
SAFETY FIRST
Despite the fact that more than three-fourths of American homes now have microwave ovens, you still may have a nagging concern about safety. “Does using the microwave mean I’m nuking my baby’s food?” is a question I’ve been asked by more than one parent. Rest assured: There’s a world of difference between nuclear radiation and the energy produced by your microwave. The waves in your oven are similar to radio waves, and once food is cooked they simply dissipate. They don’t stay in food, and baby doesn’t eat them.
The real safety issues when preparing baby food (whether using a microwave or a conventional oven) are preventing burns from food that is too hot and food poisoning from food that is undercooked. All the recipes and cooking methods I use are healthy, and microwave safety is simple. Be sure, though, to read the sections on safety. They explain why I recommend preparing foods in a certain way and help you use the microwave with complete confidence.
Microwave ovens are so safe and easy to use that many parents feel safe letting their children cook their own meals. After all, a parent reasons, if a child can learn to press the right buttons, using the microwave is so much safer than lighting the oven or using the stove top. This is true, but I think it makes parents overconfident. No small child should ever be left to use any cooking utensil—microwaves included—unsupervised.
Though the recipes in this book can be served to kids of all ages, not all children should be using the microwave oven. When surveyed, many parents stated that they felt the microwave oven was safer for their child to use than a conventional oven. The logic here is that the conventional oven gets hot while the microwave only heats the food, and therefore they assume that risk of burns is less with the microwave. That is not true, and in fact many young children have been scalded and burned while removing or eating food prepared in the microwave. Most children don’t understand the potential troubles associated with uneven cooking. While some areas of a cooked dish may be scalding hot, another part may be under-cooked and carrying bacteria that could cause illness.
There is disagreement about what age a child can safely use the microwave. Some say seven is old enough; others say wait until your child is twelve. One guideline that seems reasonable to me is to wait until your child is capable of reading well and can easily see into the oven without standing on a stool or a chair. A child who cannot read the oven’s operating instructions or the cooking instructions on a frozen-food package should not be operating the microwave oven, and a child who isn’t tall enough to see into the oven is in danger of spilling hot food and getting a nasty burn.
A MICROWAVE COOKBOOK
Obviously, there’s more to feeding your baby than learning how to use the microwave. When I was faced with feeding my first daughter for the first time, I can honestly say that I was worried. Even though I’m a dietitian, my experience with kids and food was mostly out of a textbook. I was the youngest in my family, too, so I never had much experience feeding babies.
When it came down to just me and Sarah in the kitchen, I had the same concerns all new mothers have. I wondered how much to feed and how often. I speculated about the health benefits and disadvantages of serving whole grains, beans, fish, even the so-called gassy vegetables. I looked through my nutrition books and found specific feeding advice sparse.
So, to help other mothers and myself, I read just about everything relating to food that was put out by the American Academy of Pediatrics in the last ten years and culled the medical journals and pediatric textbooks to find answers to my specific questions. The results of my research can be found in this book.
In Part 1 you’ll find a month-by-month feeding schedule, information about preventing allergies and when to introduce a variety of foods safely. Health concerns such as obesity and cholesterol are common dinner-table conversation these days, so you’ll find clear information on these health issues to help guide your feeding decisions.
In Part 2 you’ll get some hands-on advice about how and what to cook. Plain foods are on baby’s first-foods list. I’ve included an index of the top one hundred most-asked-about foods. Most are foods I think should be on every baby’s menu, either because they taste good or because they are very nutritious. Along with cooking suggestions are nutrition and storage tips. Also included are foods that don’t need cooking, such as cheese and crackers. Some surprises, such as sugar and bacon, are in the index, too. I don’t recommend these as baby foods, but I think parents need to know how and if these items can fit into a child’s menu.
Part 3 will provide you with more than fifty easy and satisfying recipes for complete one-dish meals, divided into four age groups from infants through three-year-olds. I’ve included a chapter on healthy breakfast ideas, and one with yummy suggestions for desserts, too. There is also an important section on what to feed your child when he is sick, and a question-and-answer section that contains the problems and concerns parents ask me about most.
In writing Microwave Cooking for Your Baby and Child I hoped to create a feeding resource for parents of young children. It was my intention to provide enough information in a clear manner to help parents be confident about feeding their babies and to help them raise happy, healthy kids—and have fun doing it. I hope I have been successful.