Real food baby

Online Baby-Led Weaning Course – Real Food Littles

Learn how to safely introduce your baby to a wide variety of real, home-cooked food.

Show me how

Learn how to safely introduce real food to your baby through baby-led weaning and meals you cook for the whole family.

Show me how

You’ll feed your baby over 18,000 meals from 6 months through 18.

How you start solids has a significant impact on the kind of eater your child becomes, and you probably have a lot of questions like:

What foods should I try first?
I’m terrified of choking. How do I reduce the risk?
Can I do purées too? Or is it all or nothing? (Hint: You can do both!)
How do I know I’m feeding my child the right things?
How do I introduce allergens?
Is this seriously worth all the mess?
How am I supposed to cook for my baby and the rest of my family on top of everything else?

Feeding your baby doesn’t have to be so hard. You deserve to feel confident introducing solid foods —and to enjoy the process!

Tell me more

With Real Food Littles, your baby will learn to enjoy a wide variety of nutrient-dense foods.

Meet your baby’s unique nutrition needs with confidence.

Learn how to adapt your cooking when a baby is joining in on meals.

Avoid the stress of picky eating.

Help your baby try hundreds of tastes and textures before their first birthday.

Save time, energy, and money with a step-by-step meal-planning system.

Lay the groundwork for a healthy relationship with food.

End mealtime battles and enjoy eating with your whole family.

With The Real Food Baby course, your baby will learn to enjoy a wide variety of nutrient-dense foods.

Access the Course

Meet your baby’s unique nutrition needs with confidence.

Learn cooking techniques that will change the way you cook—no experience required.

Prevent the stress of picky eating.

Help your baby try hundreds of tastes and textures before their first birthday.

Save time, energy, and money with a step-by-step meal-planning system.

Lay the groundwork for a healthy relationship with food.

End mealtime struggles and enjoy eating with your whole family.

hey, there

I’m Christiana.

I’m a health-focused personal chef and Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NPT), and my passion is helping babies develop a love of real food through baby-led weaning.

Fortunately, you don’t need to have a culinary degree or spend hours in the kitchen to raise an adventurous eater.

Real Food Littles was born out of my experience with my own twin boys and through my work with families struggling with mealtime battles and picky eating. I want you to know becoming a short-order cook for your family is not inevitable, and it’s much easier to prevent food issues than fix them.

That’s why Real Food Littles teaches evidence-based strategies and practical tips for starting solids, so you can enjoy family meals for years to come.

Access the Class

Meet Christiana

hey, there

I’m Christiana.

I’m a health-focused personal chef and Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP), and my passion is helping babies develop a love of real food through baby-led weaning.

Fortunately, you don’t need to have a culinary degree or spend hours in the kitchen to raise an adventurous eater!

Real Food Littles and The Real Food Baby course were born out of my experience with my own twin boys and through my work with families struggling with mealtime battles and picky eating. I want you to know becoming a short-order cook for your family is not inevitable, and it’s much easier to prevent food issues than fix them.

That’s why I teach evidence-based strategies and practical tips for starting solids, so you can enjoy family meals for years to come.

Meet Christiana

Sound good? Here’s how to get started.

Experience hands-on learning at your own pace, from the comfort of your own home.

Safely and effectively introduce a wide variety of solid foods to your little one.

Enjoy happy mealtimes with the same healthy menu for the whole family.

Lets do this

Sick of trying to cook for everyone in your family?

Picky eating and power struggles over food are common, but they do not have to be the norm.

Your child will eat every day for the rest of their life, and the food preferences they develop are heavily shaped by their initial food exposures and experience at the dinner table. With a relatively short developmental window of openness to new flavors, every meal counts! But, it’s easy to slip into a rut of serving the same foods over and over with so many other things on your plate. I’ve been there, and I know how busy and exhausting this season of life is.

Imagine having an easy-to-follow plan for introducing solids. Imagine your baby trying more tastes and textures before their first birthday than some people do in their lifetime—without extra work from you. Imagine feeling confident you’re meeting their nutrition needs and laying the foundation for healthy eating for life. Imagine preparing one dinner for your family and knowing even your littlest eater will enjoy it too.

A love of healthy food is one of the greatest gifts you can give your child. Real Food Littles will help you get it right.

Access the Course

Babies Eat Real Food: Getting Started with Baby-Led Weaning

So you want to feed your baby real food?

Then you need to know about baby-led weaning (BLW). BLW works wonders to expose babies to a variety of tastes, textures, temperatures, and the appearance of real foods.

The best part? It’s really simple. It involves giving a baby pieces of real food and letting them pick it up and self-feed. Easy-peasy.

Lots of newbies to BLW have questions, I am going to outline how we selected and prepared foods from 6 to 8 months of age. After 8 months, our kids went to eating the same food that we eat, therefore no special preparation was necessary (even though my daughter didn’t have any teeth until 10 months!).

There are many interpretations with how to progress each month and what to feed. Here is how we did BLW based on food types, motor skill development, and what worked for our family. For the record, I am a mother of two little ones with a Ph.D. in Child Development and a research focus in feeding
babies.

Want more research-based information on feeding babies?

Six Months: Fruits and Veggies.

Motor Skills: Fruits and Veggies are mostly served in very soft, overcooked sticks (3-4 inches long) and pieces of the size of the hand. The baby can easily grasp, pick up, hold, and nibble on these vegetables. Stay with sticks because chunks of food can be a choking hazard.

Here’s how a tray of roasted veggies would look prepped for a 6 month old.

Food Prep Advice: At first, little hands can have a hard time getting a hold of pieces of food–it is just part of the fun. Some foods are easier to grab if they are steamed and others are better roasted.

Steam cauliflower and broccoli, and serve it frequently. These bitter flavors are the least preferred by babies, so it’s important to expose early and often. Never decide if your baby “likes” or “dislikes” something–it is far too early to tell. Those little taste buds are a work in progress and always evolving.

You will want to roast some of the slippery veggies—zucchini, carrots, sweet potato, red pepper, etc. The idea is to dry them out so they are easier to handle. They should be really soft and easy to chew–like a scrambled egg.

If we are going to keep it simple–please don’t do this everyday. Chop up a variety, lay them out on a pan and cook them at the same time—then stick a few days worth in the fridge.

When feeding ripe, soft fruits (like pears and bananas) just give them to the baby in their whole form. Babies have a lot of fun gnawing away at whole fruits.

A six-month meal: Broccoli + Sweet PotatoesA six-month meal: Avocado + Zucchini

Seven Months: Fruits, Veggies, Grains, Legumes, and Spices

Motor Skills: You are going to notice your baby start to do more “raking”. This means taking the four fingers and raking them back towards the palm to scoop up food.

Raking opens up lots of doors.

They can now rake up things like quinoa, oats, beans, and lots of other less tasty small objects like paper clips and dog food. Try to continue serving sticks but add in some other foods they can self-feed and rake.

There is no way around it, raking is messy. But it’s important that they get the chance to self-feed.

Your baby will be on the fast track to the pincer grasp (picking up with the pointer finger and thumb), which brings some dignity to BLW. Also consider loading a spoon for him and handing it over so he can practice getting it in his mouth.

Food Prep Advice: Keep serving up all of the above and start mixing things together. Quinoa and frozen peas, oats and avocados, brown rice and beans, etc. I like to make a large batch of grains and keep it in the fridge, mixing it with different veggies each day.

I am a big fan of the early mixing of foods and not a fan of serving foods separately in plates with compartments. Foods touching one another is natural and should be encouraged. Add some spices to keep it interesting.

A seven-month meal: Quinoa + Peas (plus cumin and olive oil)

Eight Months: Family dinner, game on.

Motor Skills: You will start to see some raking mixed with a little pincer action. The pincer grasp tends to emerge somewhere around the time that babies crawl (the hands get a lot of strengthening and stimulating that way)–so don’t worry if it is later. Your baby will be able to pick up almost anything you put in front of them with raking or pincer grip. If you have not already started doing so, try loading the spoon and fork and handing it to them to self-feed.

Food prep advice: This is where we got lazy. No more cooking separate food. At 8 months, they started eating everything we eat, but without salt. We do eat healthy, which made this transition easier. At this age we started to serve meat, but we are careful to only give hormone and antibiotic-free meats–which is a personal preference.

Rather than adding salt while cooking, I first scoop the baby’s food out and onto her plate, and then salt the rest for the grown-ups at the end. I swear by the Pampered Chef Kitchen Chopper. I can chop up her food the tiniest pieces, or leave them larger in a matter of seconds.

An eight-month meal: Martha Stewart’s Warm Quinoa + Chicken Salad

This is where my BLW advice ends, because we have now introduced real, grown up food that has lots of colors, textures, flavors, and temperatures. Don’t expect your baby to progress on the same path. There are many options to deviate and go in your own direction. Using purees for some meals and real food for others is fine—it is important that you find the right blend that works for your family.

Want more research-based information on feeding babies?

Dutch Baby Pancake

February 13, 2018

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# pancakes
# American kitchen

Categories: Classics, American cuisine, Pancakes, Budget recipes

Pancake for the whole pan under the mischievous name "Dutch Baby" will not leave anyone indifferent. It is so easy to cook and very tender, it just melts in your mouth. In combination with the traditional addition of lemon juice and powdered sugar, this is an unearthly pleasure with a minimum of effort expended. This pancake is a cross between British Yorkshire puddings and Pannekoek Dutch pancakes, which I wrote about in the article about culinary trip to Holland . Fictional in the US, most likely at Manca's Cafe in Seattle. Only the name itself remains controversial. Sometimes in the States they call this pancake German or "Bismarck", although the common name is "Dutch Baby". And most likely because the Americans sin with ignorance in relation to other countries and nations, unfortunately it is, and for them Dutch (in English "Dutch") or Deutsch (in German "German"), with a large number of dialects and nationalities in the country itself, sound the same and indicate almost the same origin. One way or another, this airy and very tender pancake is very tasty. Definitely worth it to cook it again and again.

It is very important that the oven and dishes in which you will bake such a pancake are well heated. This is important for the pancake to rise well. And when you put the oil in a hot pan, before pouring the dough into it, it is important that it is well distributed over the entire surface of the pan, along the bottom and along the walls.

The best frying pans for this dish are cast-iron frying pans with cast handles. Glazed or not. They heat up well and conduct heat evenly. In fact, these pans are one of my favorites.

And you need to understand that, according to the laws of physics, the “Dutch Baby”, although it rises very well, still quickly falls off. But because of this, the pancake does not become less tasty. Only if you want to impress your relatives, then after pouring the dough into the pan, call them to the kitchen :-) so that everyone is at the table when you take out your huge "Dutch crumb" :-). By the way, for a family of 4 it is better to make a double serving at once. That is, you should have 2 pans in the oven, or between baking, wait until the pan warms up again before pouring the next batch of dough.

1 thick pancake 24-26 cm in diameter:

For the dough:

70 grams flour
2 eggs
250 ml milk
1 tbsp Sahara
2 tsp vanilla extract (or 1 sachet of vanilla sugar)

In addition:

40 grams butter, room temperature
Powdered sugar for sprinkling
Juice of 1/4 lemon

1) Preheat the oven to 200 ᵒС (ideally with convection, without convection, you can also heat up to 220Сᵒ). In the oven, put a frying pan 24-26 cm in diameter, ideally cast iron, warm up with the oven.

2) In a deep bowl or bowl of a planetary mixer, beat milk, eggs, sugar and vanilla extract until smooth.

3) Add flour and beat everything together again, not stirring too long, just enough to completely mix the ingredients. Lumps of flour will disappear when straining the dough.

4) Strain the dough into a clean bowl or jug through a fine sieve, rubbing any lumps of flour with a spoon. And mix the dough again.

5) When the oven and pan are hot, put the butter in the pan and carefully but quickly spread it over the entire surface of the pan, including the sides. And pour the batter into the prepared pan. Insert into preheated oven.

All this must be done very quickly !! So that the pan does not cool down and does not release heat from the oven. Therefore, this one without a photo, because there is no time for this, and the result is more important than documenting the process.

6) Bake the pancake until it rises well and is well browned.

Take the "Dutch Baby" pancake out of the oven,

Drizzle with lemon juice and sprinkle with powdered sugar to serve.

Enjoy your meal!

Read "New Wit" - MayO Stepfordi - Page 3

— How many times do I have to tell you? I screeched. — Now for me there is nothing more important than my career! I have to do anything for this! Yes, it's a huge sacrifice, but I have to make it! The world needs me, mom. The world needs my art!

“As if she doesn’t know that only pathetic losers fall for Choose Your Own Adventure!0 or more!

- As you say, Beggy. If you can find your happiness in the Wilderness Village, I will be only happy for you!

“Mom,” I groaned. “Of course, you are my best friend, and you can rightly be proud of this achievement, but can’t you just leave me alone for at least five minutes? You just smother me with your kindness and love! You're suppressing my personality! I'm going to send you a short email asking you to get off me for at least three chapters, okay?

I slammed the phone against the wall and threw myself on the bed. It's time to get it right. It doesn't matter that I myself decided to move here - this step still caused me indescribable anguish.

I moaned for a long time, pouring out my pain and rage into the night, and the wind howled under the windows, expressing metaphorical sympathy for my bottomless despair with this well-worn literary cliché.

No one has ever suffered like I have. That is, everyone knows that all young people at one time suffered in exactly the same way, but I was still the one and only. If I were to write poems about my sorrows - which, of course, I don’t do, because I have long outgrown this kindergarten - it would look something like this:0003

Rain

Outside my window.

Rain

In my heart.

Darkness

And despair

Watering me

Dripping drops

Like rain.

Finally, eloquently and picturesquely crying out the heartache of my seventeen years, I fell into a dream.

Chapter 2

FOR THE FIRST TIME

The next morning I woke up with a complex mixture of confusion, humility and purification. The Wilderness Village was waiting for me in all its bleak, raw, casually described splendor.

I pulled back the curtains and was amazed at the view. A beautiful golden beach stretched to the horizon, thick green palm trees grew on one side of it, and the clearest blue sea splashed on the other.

I allowed myself to experience an instant surge of hope, until I noticed a bright sign across the blue sky: "Welcome to Cancun!" Angrily tearing the stupid poster from the window, I crumpled it into a ball, cursing Lohi with his idiotic jokes.

“Doesn't he understand how sensitive and humorless I am? Such stupid pranks can be truly fatal for such a vulnerable and boring creature as I!”

On the other hand, I was smart enough to figure out that in this way Lohi was clumsily trying to offer me his male friendship - or something similar from the same opera - to understand which I did not have the necessary set of chromosomes, so I decided to leave his audacious trick without consequences , by tapping into a supernatural supply of mercy that she has always been justifiably proud of.

“It looks like I got it right with the Wilderness Village – look, I was only here for one day, but I already felt that my emotional palette was becoming much richer and more refined.”

The actual view from my window had nothing to do with Mexico. “When it rained, it rained very damp and rainy - (you need to learn how to describe the rain better; probably, essays on this topic will be assigned at the Academy, because there is no other weather here anyway), - and the trees surrounding the house oozed with drops of moisture. Their mighty trunks rose into the sky, and the ivy that braided their powerful thickness looked like swollen veins, pulsing with furious life under solid gray clouds ... ”Something in this spectacle deeply disturbed me, but I could not understand what exactly.

Lohi sat downstairs in the kitchen, staring at the local press. He was reading some article, but when he heard my steps, he hastily raised his eyes and folded the newspaper so that I didn’t have time to read the headline - it seems that I didn’t see something about the fact that someone was found squeezed out or drunk.

— Salut, Begg, how are things in Mexico?

I ignored his attempt to strike up a friendly conversation, hoping that my silent disapproval would help Lohey realize that his rustic sense of humor had no chance of impressing my unusually refined and versatile soul. I noticed a belt in Loha's hands and drew attention to the fact that one end of it was all slobbered.

- Fuckers, are you chewing on your belt?

- Well, it's like, yeah, haha. Decided to lighten up before work.

— Damn you, daddy, you call this breakfast? I grinned affectionately.

— Well, Begg, I can't say that I particularly liked it, it's just that I'm so upset after your mother left me fifteen years ago that I can't even stop by the store.

— You are a despicable little soul, and you are just pathetic! But don't worry, after school I'll go to the supermarket and buy some food. Actually, I love to cook. I cooked all the time for my mother, who, between us, is as worthless as you, so I had the opportunity to practice describing a variety of dishes.

"By the way, the description of the food helps to make the narrative less dreary, in addition, some dishes can be used as a metaphor."

I saw that I was wasting my time: my eloquence Lohi flew in one ear and out the other, but he smiled happily at the thought of a real house with real food on the table.

— Well? I barked.

— What, baby?

- Money, Fuckers! I want to remind you that the products will not pay for themselves! To be honest, you are incredibly careless and unforgivably obsessed with your ego.

“Well, of course, dear, here,” he handed me a bundle of banknotes.

— And?

— And? he asked incredulously. - What? Car keys? He gave them to me and I stomped to the door.

- Bye Lohi, I don't want to be late for school on the first day.

As the front door slammed shut behind me, I heard my dad call out pleadingly after me:

— Hey, Begg, how am I going to get to work?

Brushing aside his ordinary worries, I ran to the car in the rain and turned the key in the ignition. The engine fired up confidently, and I drove off.

While driving in the rain, I thought about what this Academy would be like. I was absolutely sure that the students here would not be able to figure out how to approach me, and that, like in all previous schools, I would become an outcast. To be honest, I hated this role with all my heart, although it once again proved my uniqueness against the backdrop of the routine that surrounded me in this world. I only hoped that the teachers of the Academy would be able to recognize and grow my potential - unlike the previous mentors, who only drove me away from themselves, stating that they had a headache from me.

“These profoundly nonsensical parodies of teachers would not be able to recognize a literary genius even if he wrote them a three-page sentence without a single punctuation mark…”

As I approached the crossroads, I studied the road sign carefully. The road straight ahead was marked "Supermarket and Restaurant (Movies Only)" with a sign to the right reading "School" and to the left reading "All Other Locations".