...so for everyone who's thinking 'where do I start?', the answer is generally 'at the bottom and read up'. In the case of Finger Foods, however, I have 'organised' (and I cannot use that word too loosely) the first couple of months' posts into Month 1 and Month 2. Look to your  left, two new sub-sections have just appeared as if by magic!
It's just what I happened to give Babybear, though, so you must absolutely do what you like if you want to give different foods (apart from things like peanuts, obviously). Good luck!

Ooooh, my neighbours have just promised me a butternut squash from their organic allotment. How exciting...

More to the point I appear to have reached the end of the hellacious list that I wrote WEEKS ago on the front page which means I will soon be liberated, free at last to write about the other fifty million things that the baby has eaten recently. And post some actual recipes... be still my beating heart.

So, butternut squash, then? Roast it.

You know, peel it with a peeler, scoop out seeds (can be quite slimy and orangey) and cut into segments. Toss in some olive oil and sling in the oven at 180-ish fan and 200-ish for a normal oven. No salt, but you knew that already. I'm never very good at cooking times because I am an avid poker and prodder, but I'd say check it after 20 minutes to turn them over and you can see how long you think they've got to go. Not more than about another 10 minutes I'd have thought.

Husband and I eat this mostly as a potato substitute or in a risotto. More often the risotto, now that I think of it. I just make a white risotto (loads of parmesan, onion, carnaroli rice, garlic) and then stir the squash through at the end as it can break up too much and you are left with an orangey mush  and lord knows we are all here to avoid mush as much as possible.

The baby loves the chunks of squash, either warm or the next day cold and is very bold about eating the risotto with her hands as well. Her father and I put our salt on separately, so she's fine with it.

Oh, I have even spread warm roasted squash onto some buttered crusty bread for her when she was frankly too starving to wait a minute longer for food. I had some too, it was surprisingly comfort food-y.

Any melon except Honeydew, unless you honestly like them (in which case I would merely ask 'have you never tasted the succulent orange flesh of a Galia?' and meekly let it go...)

Melon has been the subject of some of my most rigorous experimentation.

I've so far resisted the temptation to inject them with straight Calpol à la Jamie Oliver and his vodka watermelon but I have nevertheless toiled over the best way to present it to my baby in a manner that means that she doesn't immediately drop it.

We started with thin slices of Galia. It's quite a small melon (look, realistically this is all going to get a bit Carry On so just get the sniggering over and done with now... Better? Good, I will continue.)

I used to slice the melon (obviously after having halfed it and scooped out the seeds) and then cut off, say, three-quarters of the rind so that the baby would have something a bit drier to hold onto. Worked fine, but she kept on forgetting that she had it in her hand and dropping it which was a bit of a waste.

I then noticed that if the melon was cold from the fridge, Miss Babybear seemed to prefer it and indeed spent as much time chewing the rind as she did eating the flesh. (Personally, I think that keeping melon in the fridge is a bit of a crime as it kills the taste but the Babybear's beak is sufficiently sore to warrant it at the moment.)

Thereafter, I made sure that I gave the melon a good scrub (you lot have been warned...) before cutting it so that I knew the skin was clean. I have also refined my original melon slice design since Babybear got a bit better at holding things, so now I cut the slice then cut the rind off in the middle of the slice leaving an inch or so at the ends. Then I cut the slice in half to make two smaller bits with rind on. Very, very handy for taking out as they fit nicely into those silly wee tupperwares, and what's more I can have some too. Unless it's a Honeydew. You're on your own there, kiddo.

The perfect baby led weaning food, I reckon. Not too messy, easy to prepare and it arrives pre-formed into the Rapley 'chip-shape'. Or the shape of a spear or asparagus, if you will.

The one mystery to asparagus is how you get rid of the woody bit at the bottom, but it's really very simple, you just hold it at both ends and gently bend until it snaps. Keep the top bit.

Uum, apart from that, steam the spears for about 6 minutes (obviously it depends on how thin they are). I over-cooked them to a sludgy green when I first gave them to Babybear but now she happily downs them al dente.

I have dipped them in hummus or cream cheese for her - am still a little frightened of putting her in charge of her own dip, since The Yoghurt Incident (see photo) - but I reckon she prefers them unadulterated. The only downside is that the season is so short. Yeah, you can get them flown in from Kenya all year round, but some of us very occasionally try to think about air miles an' that.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with this orange tuber. I love it and it hates me. (Wow, what a cliché, I really must try harder with this blog...)

My friend bakes them all the time and they are delicious. When I try they seem to drip molten lava onto the bottom of my oven which I will possibly clean the weekend before we move house. No plans to relocate at the moment, I'm just trying to give you an idea of my housekeeping schedule.

The sweet potato stalagmites that litter the floor of my oven have taught me a valuable lesson, though. You can never have too much kitchen foil. (By the way, was kitchen foil much more expensive in the 70s? My mother used to get palpitations if she over-estimated the size of a roasting tray by a wasteful half-inch...she HATES watching me pull screeds and screeds out to lavishly double layer a grill pan).

Having given up on making a baked sweet potato that doesn't explode in a hail of orangey shrapnel, I now tend to cut them into wedges and roast them on the foil-lined grill tray. Toss them in olive oil first, and I have found that smoked paprika makes a sensational spicy substitute for salt.

Roast them at 180-ish if it's a fan oven, 200-ish if not, for about 35 minutes. Again, you'll maybe have to rinse them to cool if you are in a hurry.

Babybear just loves them, though. Being orange they are pretty messy, as they don't make hard chips in the traditional sense but remain pretty squashy. Oooh, I've really tempted myself with this one. We are SO having smokey sweet potato wedges tomorrow. With a salad, natch...

So far, my darling daughter has chomped her way through the ever-versatile potato in many guises.

Roast potatoes. Yum. What can I say? Roast your potatoes whichever way you usually do (but no salt, boo, hiss) and then cut up and give to baby. Ta-dah! Actually, I am often forced to run potatoes for Babybear under the tap as they have frankly dangerous heat-retaining properties.

Jersey Royals. Oh, she loves these. Boil or steam (steam, I say) under tender (start checking with fork after ten minutes) then cut into quarters, leave to cool or run under cold water and hand to baby, noting any peach-like prefernce for skin-side up or down.

Chips. Yeah, yeah... What-EVVUR. Give them a chip every now and again for god's sakes. But blow on them first, in that marvelously inneffectual way that parents do. Obviously I wouldn't recommend making them a part of their daily diet (nor yours, now that I come to it) but if you find yourself in a restaurant or cafe and have checked that they haven't been salted then go on... live a little.

You'll no doubt have gathered by now that what I am attempting to do is systematically work my way through the list of Babybear's favourite delicacies that I mention on the front page... it's taking a while, eh?

Well, nobody's feeling it more than me, let me tell you... if I don't get it finished soon I'll have to regress her to a diet of sloppy baby rice for a fortnight while I catch up on her spectacular dietary habits.

Anyhow. Roast chicken.

First roast your chicken. I do it upside down (but enough about my love life, fnarr fnarr) so that the breasts are yummy and juicy, then whip off the tinfoil (again, enough about my love life) and turn it over for the last half hour so that the skin crisps. For extra flavour I tend to stick a lemon and some herbs, rosemary or thyme let's say, up its backside (insert your own sex joke here) especially now that the baby precludes smothering the skin in salt.

I found that the easiest and tastiest bit of the chicken to give to Babybear comes off the leg, but I suspect I'm going to find it hard to describe. You know, the kinda bingo wing bit, but it's on the leg... do I mean the thigh? Maybe. Anyway, the pieces part in almost a teardrop shape, which is perfect for baby led weaning, and the sinews of the meat run lengthways. I have found that if I give her the slightly drier breast meat she loses interest quicker and because more bits come off she is more likely to gag. Whatever works for you, kiddo. Oh and she's not above sucking on a bit of the skin. Nor is her mother.

Boomer has been born into a family with a long held belief in the health giving properties of starting the day with a couple of weetabix. This conviction has been passed down through generations.  This is from her fathers side I think the flaky logs are particularly loathsome.

Anyway, so I gave Boomer a dry weetabix to play with and she scoffed almost a whole one, she sucked on it chewed and generally mushed it up until it was gone.

 

A word of warning dried weetabix bits are like some kind of cement – they give a pebble dashed appearance. Boomer is going to require an extra half hour in the tub tonight.

I don’t really know what the solution would be perhaps immediate soaking after weetabix but that’s a bit of a faff.

I think the best solution is to let her enjoy weetabix with her papa and then let papa deal with the mess.

Yes, pork fillet. If you don't believe me take a look at the Photos folder...
Anyway, we are at my mum's house and she is making dinner for her daughter (that's me - do keep up at the back). It's like Baby Led Weaning, but thirty years later.

So mum douses pork fillet in lemon and parsley butter, fries it on a ridged pan and puts it on my plate alongside some salad and some Jersey Royal potatoes. Yum Yum, thanks Mum.

Now, you might think that some lettuce, some potatoes and some cucumber might satifsy a younger person but no... once Miss Babybear had spotted her mother and grandmother tucking into their delicious meal then nothing else would do.

I first of all cut it into a kinda chip-shaped piece which was NOT a good idea as she was able to bite too many pieces off and was doing a bit of gagging.

Being my daughter, however, her will to eat the pork outweighed any sense of fear that she might have of an imminent choking incident so she continued to eat it and I was forced to take it off her.

Plan B, and this is the one in the photo, was to give her a lump the size of her fist (actually, this is in Gill Rapley's guidelines but I had forgotten) and Babybear was absolutely fine with it. She just chewed and chewed and sucked on it, turning around in her wee hands until she was left with a pretty tired and grey looking piece of meat which she dropped casually to the floor. This was, as you would expect, accompanied by a round of applause from the two preceding generations of women who surrounded her. Ma che brava!

26th July 2006
Funnily enough we haven't given her that much pasta yet, principally because I like it with a tomato-based sauce and she isn't supposed to be eating tomatoes yet. Also it does sometimes cross my mind that we are overloading her with gluten (what with the Organix Moon Biscuits and the constant rounds of toast) so if we're not eating pasta I'm certainly not making it specially.
I read somewhere that Farfalle and Fusilli are good for babies to hold onto, so that's what we have in the cupboard at the moment. She likes it with pesto, parmesan and asparagus, that sort of thing...


Update 4 March 2007

Nine months on from my first post and I am killing myself laughing about my po-faced 'we're not eating much pasta'... Babybear would now eat it morning, noon and night if I let her. We mostly stuck to Fusilli as the Farfalle were a bit gaggy to begin with (although she's fine with it now, obviously). I really want to recommend Conchiglie though, because the sauce gets stuck inside the shell so it becomes a dinky little parcel of veggie, carb and protein. We rarely have spaghetti as  both Babybear and her father find it irritating, but the conchiglie are perfect for a spag blog.

Babybear eats A Lot of the three Ps, pesto, peas and pasta. It's our never-fail meal, to be honest. Sometimes I'll stir in some cream, creme fraiche or soft cheese if there is some in the fridge. Sometimes I'll whack in some fried bacon as well. Oh yes, we know how to live round our house, let me tell you...

Ladies and gentlemen, if it's good enough for Apple Paltrow-Martin, it is good enough for my daughter...

I should, of course, be making this delicious mix of chickpeas, sesame seed paste, garlic, lemon juice, salt and olive oil myself but I'm afraid that a month of baby-led weaning has left me reluctant to approach the Magimix. Perhaps some day...

Actually, I have made it before but I do prefer the shop-bought stuff. It's creamy-licious. The baby has it on toast, rice cakes (more of which elsewhere) or banana if she's feeling adventurous and I am too frazzled to clean her up between courses. It does go everywhere but it's quite benign really, thanks to the pale colour, and easily wiped off.

Now, some people might want to shy away from hummus as the sesame paste can be a trigger for allergies but neither my partner (he's actually my husband but that makes me feel so OLD) are allergic-y and we eat a lot of Lebanese food so we've decided to go for it. We were in a cafe today enjoying a spot of meze and Babybear was perfectly content to suck hummus off some flatbread. The pickled, hot red pepper that the Husband handed her by mistake was another story...

PS Marks & Spencer has just brought in a couple of new hummuses (hummi?).
There's an organic one, which is tasty and whatnot and only available in the smaller size. But the real stroke of genius is their idea to package three tiny little pots (say, two sandwiches worth) so that you don't have to keep throwing out unused hummus after three days. Wonderful, wonderful work. Although only available in Reduced Fat and containing maltodextrin, which is a bit of a bummer.

Ye Gods. This is a rather delicious recipe that the Husband and I frequently enjoy but even I wouldn't just have handed it over to the baby... he had no such qualms.
She loved it, of course.

Aaah, that most capricious of fruits, with its three-minute period of perfect ripeness book-ended by weeks of rock hard-ness or headily perfumed squishiness. I can't be bothered with them, really.

I've given them to the baby a couple of times, and she thinks they are okay. I don't bother giving her chip-sized portions, i just slice the bum-cheek off one side and had it over. It is kinda messy but at least it's wet and clear so it's easy to wipe up.

Well, it's not the most interesting ingredient but it's pretty useful to take out with you as it's pretty clean. I used to cut it lengthways in the chip shape stylee (taking the seeds out) but interestingly the baby has recently decided that she quite likes it in the form of a thick-ish disc.  I think it might be because it is nicer to chew on, and the cooler the better, what with her poor teeth...
 

Green, slimy, deee-licious, the avocado is probably the blandest foodstuff that my daughter eats. I first gave her it as a finger food proper (not a great success - it shot out of her hand and proved impossible to pick up - cue tears of frustration) but now she gets it on toast or a  rice cake. I take one out with us to the park and I eat half of it on bread (doused in lemon juice and buckets of salt, it's a heart attack waiting to happen) while the bub has some plain.
 
Some people think they are a pain to open up but the secret is to slice it in half lengthways and twist it (not unlike the peach) leaving you with one side open and the other still containing the stone. The spiffy thing with the avocado is that if you doink the knife into the stone it will lift straight out. Does not work with a peach, as I found out to mine and the NHS's cost.

This creepy, furry orange fruit is one of my daughter's favourites... bleurgh. Thank god it has a fairly short season.
Wash it, cut it in half, remove the stone and hand to child with the skin side facing outwards. Actually, they're not bad to take out to cafes etc with you as they fit quite nicely into those silly wee tupperwares and can be cut open with a normal knife. But they do ripen quickly and get very squishy very fast so time it right or everyone will get covered in orange mush.

My favourite food ever, and now my baby's... I'm so very proud.
I just wash it, half it across the stone, and twist sharply so that the halves come apart then cut into quarters and remove the stone. She used to grab my hand when I was eating peaches so we first started with me holding it and her sucking/biting on it but it didn't take long for her to want to take it herself.

I've noticed that it's easier to give the baby the peach quarter with the skin side facing outwards as she seems to go at it from underneath with her rather marvellous brand new TWO TEETH. My cup runneth over...

Anyway, all I'm saying it that it might be worth noting which side your baby prefers to have the skin side facing. To be honest I was a bit paranoid about her eating the skin to begin with but apart from a couple of bleary-eyed spit-ups she was absolutely fine. Keep an eye on it, though. If we see a worryingly large bit of food going in, my husband and I start making hilarious puking faces, sticking our tongues out, crossing our eyes and whatnot (it's veeeeery attractive) and she normally laughs and spits it out.

Now, cheese is a trickier prospect than it initially sounds, so here are my thoughts.

My friend, who is Annabel Karmelising her eight-month-old child, is now getting to the stage where her darling boy (and he IS a darling) is eating finger foods. Cheese-wise, she went out to the supermarket and bought the blandest, most organic-est cheddar she could get her mitts on. I think it was a 'Strength 1' cheese, on that peculiar cheese tastiness index that all supermarkets seem to have adopted recently. (Don't get me started on that - since when did 'strength' have any bearing on taste?) Naturally, the bold boy loved it and now happily feeds himself flavourless cheddar whenever the opportunity arises. However, the system does mean that their's is now a two-cheese household.

Bearing in mind that I carelessly combine both a capacity for laziness and disorganisation, I can't handle the pressure of maintaining a ready supply of both parental and infant cheeses, so we just started Babybear off on a vintage cheddar. (Size 5! Get us!) Happy to report that she enjoyed it, but the problem was that it crumbled into pieces almost immediately which was very frustrating for a hungry nipper.

We've shopped around, airily dismissing the brittle curded offerings of Somerfield, Tesco and Safeway, but finding both the Isle of Bute organic cheddar from Sainsbury's and the Canadian Mature from M&S rather tasty. The Marks one is best on points for the kiddies as it is quite greasy so doesn't fall apart but I personally like the sainsbury's one better.

All in all, my advice would be to start your child on the cheese you like and adjust upwards or downwards from there. As for working out how to cut it up, it rather depends on the crumbliness or otherwise of the cheese. That Canadian Cheddar can handle being cut up into a chip shape, and with the others sometimes a small squarish slice about 5cm x 5cm x 1cm holds together well, but there's more wastage.

(Gad, who knew there was so much to cheese? And I didn't even go near the whole dairy intolerance thing. Mostly because I don't know anything about it. As usual, if anyone has anything to add about cheese/baby led weaning etc, post away. I should go now, as my head has just exploded due to calculating the perfect Baby Led Weaning dimensions for a slice of cheese. I used to be a career woman, for god's sake.)

Philly, full-fat. Is there any other kind?

According to Gill Rapley, you are better off giving your child toast than bread because the toast is kinda crunchier and is less likely to go claggy and get stuck in the babies' mouths. (I hardly need add that she expresses the concept rather more elegantly than I just did.)
I started Babybear off with some crusts of Italian bread in a cafe (honestly, the life I lead... it's a social whirl) but it was a bit too sharp so I slightly pre-chewed it in the mummy bird style.

Back at home, I am more likely to toast bread, pop some cream cheese or butter or hummus on it and then cut it into slices for the baby.

Initially I used white bread (for that mega-insulin rush) but I have slowly moved her towards a brown multi-grain that her father and I eat. She did a bit of gagging on it a couple of times but it's fine now. I'm not sure about the brown bread, however, as I read on the internet that fibre can interfere with Vitamin C absorption. But we all know that things you find on the internet can be very unreliable, har, har...

If anyone has any information on this I'd be delighted to hear about it. Cheers, all.

It was just one. Her Grandma gave it to her. There was no salt on it. It was a nice restaurant. We were out for Babybear's father's birthday. It won't happen again. (Aitch hangs head in shame).
Babybear LOVED it, by the way. See photo.

Not green ones. Why anyone would submit to consuming a sour green pepper is quite beyond me.
Interestingly, the one time Babybear wolfed down a pepper was when I gave her a raw slice of a rather elderly red one that had been lying around the fridge for a while. It was a little bit wrinkly, but probably quite sweet so she really enjoyed it. I have since given her raw and steamed (for about 3 minutes) organic pepper to chew on but it appears her love affair with this vegetable is over. I'm thinking it will be good for dipping in greek yoghurt, hummus or cream cheese in the future...

A note to my husband, however. Dearest, if we are in a Lebanese cafe and you see what you think is a piece of roast red pepper on your plate, please to not automatically hand it to our child. We wouldn't want to blow her tiny head off with a hot, pickled pepper now, would we?

So far, rice cakes are the only food stuff that break my somewhat sniffy 'if I wouldn't eat them, I'm not giving them to my baby' rule. God, but they honk...
Anyway, as long as you don't breathe in when you open the bag then rice cakes are useful for taking out with you as they don't make much mess. I take them out in a dinky little Tupperware pot that I bought for my purees, haw haw.
I buy Cow & Gate ones which are especially for babies and have extra vitamins added and don't contain added salt etc etc but I'd be interested to know if it'd be cheaper or somehow better to get adult 'no-salt' ones. Of course, they wouldn't fit in my baby-sized plastic pots...
If we are in the house I put hummus or cream cheese on them, which Babybear licks off/sticks up her nose/rubs into her hair before sucking the rice cake to death.
I can't think that there's much to recommend them nutritionally, other than if you are trying to avoid gluten which I appreciate a lot of people are. I just give her them because they are tidy. Does that make me a bad mother, I ask you?

Oh for goodness sakes... you know what to do with a carrot.

Peel it, slice it lengthways into quarters, cut into two inch pieces and then steam it for as long as you feel. Start off by doing it for, let's say, 4 minutes, by which time it should be quite soft. Leave to cool or run under the tap, etc etc then give to the bub.
 
Apart from a peach which my baby grabbed from my hands, steamed carrot was her first food. To begin with she didn't have the knack of chewing or gumming her food so she would lean forward and bite a big chunk off which would promptly fall straight out of her mouth. It was only when I saw some tell-tale orangey 'material' in her nappy that I realised anything had gone in at all.

Carrots are great to take out with you as they aren't terribly messy, and as the babies' teeth start to come in they will enjoy chomping on some raw carrot straight from the fridge. Not a lot of the raw stuff goes in, so it's really for the teething.

Post Script October 2006
Actually, what I've discovered is that carrots are brilliant steamed for starting off, then great raw when those very first teeth start coming in. However, once Babybear began to get the hang of biting (by which I suppose I mean hanging onto the carrot and wrenching it hard out of her mouth) I began to get a bit worried about choking hazards again. So if she gets raw carrot I now give it to her in big fat discs. Although she's gone right off her former favourite so it's a moot point at the moment.

Post Post Script March 2007
And now she's back on the raw carrot again. I suppose it could be considered a choking hazard still, like everything else. But I wonder if the fact that she's eating it as if it's a sweetie outweighs the potential for a wee cough? Anyway, she never has so I'm not thinking about it just now. She likes the lengths quartered and just bites little bits off with great delight. Oh, and she also thinks it is delicious in spag bol, chilli, stir fries etc. It's weird how they go on and off things...

Top and tail them then steam them over boiling water for about 4-5 minutes. Leave to cool or run under cold water. Try one yourself to check that they're not too hot inside then give one to your baby. So cute, what normally happens with my bub is she chews the outside until it goes kinda stringy and sooks the beans out of the inside. Too gorgeous. And hardly any mess, hurrah!

Cut your broccoli up to make 'trees', but not too small. It's best, I have found, to leave as much of the stalk as possible to be used as a handle, but if you think that it makes the 'tree' part too big then slice up through the stalk to half or even quarter it lengthways.

Steam your broccoli over some boiling water for 6-7 minutes then leave to cool (or run under cold water if you are in a hurry, but remember that if you feel it's too hard still that this will stop the cooking process).

Give it to your child and if they are good and clever they will hold it by the 'handle' and eat the 'tree'. My child resolutely refuses to do anything but dig her fingers into the branches of the tree part and chew on the stalk, which causes the top part to disintegrate in the most alarming fashion and to fly across the room. It goes EVERYWHERE. You know those chubby little folds of fat that you love to tickle? In there. And that beautiful, expensive high chair* you bought? In every seam of the the fabric seat, every hinge, every corner. Broccoli, my friends, is very much a pre-bathtime vegetable. But delicious and healthy and oh-so enjoyable for the babies.

*Please see Top Tips on buying a highchair.

Wash, chop into pieces about two inches long and then slice the pieces into wedges. Remove the seeds if you like. I don't tend to, it depends how fresh and young you think the courgette is (and how fresh and young you are feeling at that particular moment).
Really handy to take out with you as they don't make much mess, not a great deal gets eaten but the babies enjoy sucking and chewing on the sticks and it seems to help their teeth.
I have also given my baby some steamed courgette, which she enjoyed and a lot more went in, although if I'm honest she likes it best lightly fried in butter. Just like her parents...