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.