As it happens, we favour rib-eye steak in this household for its extra juiciness and considerable chearperness than yer sirloin or popeseye (please don't laugh at the Scottish names for cuts of meat - I've no idea what you foreigners call them). As I've mentioned before, nothing competes with Babybear's avowed passion for roast chicken but she does much enjoy a good hunk of beef.

We tend to cook ours to a medium (heat up the pan first, as I'm sure you know, while you dry the meat with kitchen towel and rub oil into the flesh, yum-yum) and then give Babybear some of the more cooked pieces from the outside. She gets it pink, though, and it hasn't killed her yet. But go on, line up to tell me how I'm endangering her life...

Ah, autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, as some dead poet once said. (Think it was Keats, but to be honest I probably only remember the poem because the next line contains the word 'bosom').

As Lorna has already pointed out in the increasingly enormous Main Page comments section, there are pumpkins to be eaten but it's best to keep them small-to-medium or they lose flavour. However, our great triumph thus far has been corn-on-the-cob, simply microwaved for three to five minutes in a covered glass dish with a splash of water.
They are hot when they come out, and much as you try to run them under the tap to cool them the cob stays boiling so you have to set them aside for a while until you're sure it's safe.



Then chop the cob into 1-2 inch pieces, take a bite yourself to get things started and voila, one happy, occupied child. Some children can eat the whole thing (please see above photo and the impressive Little Wriggler) but I just chop them up to save wasting a whole cob at a time. Babybear tends to get bored about halfway through so I just cut the rest of the corn off for her and let her exercise her pincer grip for maximum time wasteage.

And I know that I said I would look into baby sweetcorn ages ago... I have tried to buy them but while there are so many local veggies around it seems too naughty to clock up that many air miles. (My corn-on-the-cob came from Spain, which is hardly round the corner but still...) I have no doubt, however, that faced with a farmers' market filled with turnips I will cave in this winter and try the baby corn, wherever it has flown in from.

Not my first choice of vegetable I'd have to say, but we were out for lunch at a friend's house and in addition to cooking roast beef, Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes, asparagus and baby carrots, he knocked up a bowlful of brussels.
Babybear thought them rather marvellous, actually, and very much enjoyed biting chunks out of hers with her four new top teeth. Later, while her parents were discussing how tiresome it is to be driven onto the pavement and into a fence by some tit in a 4 x 4 (so often the topic of discussion, I find), she contented herself with peeling the leaves of the sprout back, fanning them out and blowing on them in the manner of Citizen Kane's Jedediah Leland at the opera.

Did not notice any increase in her already prodigious farting after the meal, so that's one worry crossed off the list for Christmas Day.

...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!

For all that I do like cooking more complex meals, doing Baby Led Weaning with Babybear has re-introduced me to the simple pleasure of a slice of bread with a decidedly generous slathering of butter. (Hey, Babybear needs her fats, doesn't she?) As it happens I buy an unsalted butter and if possible organic as I once read an article on how they make spreads and those room temperature butters and it turned my stomach.

Certainly if you are just starting baby led weaning, the advice would be to toast the bread so that it doesn't go all claggy and get stuck in the roof of their mouths, but once the babies get better at eating (you'll know when) then I cannot recommend a good old slice of B'n'B too highly.

Now come on, this is impressive...

Went to Wagamama, where they have dinky little highchairs pre-attached to the tables in the children's section and ordered some Chilli Chicken Ramen (chilli, salty soup, chicken and noodles - didn't 100% think that through, if I'm honest) while my dining companions ordered some Chicken Itame (a noodley coconut-y soup) and some of that mad breaded Chicken Katsuo curry with rice.

To keep us from falling off our perches with city centre-induced exhaustion, we also ordered some edamame (soy beans) and asked for the salt on the side. Well, I can't tell you how much Babybear enjoyed those little beans, but if I explain that she was operating a two-handed approach whereby she was picking up her next bean before the first one was fully chewed then you begin to get the idea.

The edamame comes in a little bowl and looks for all the world like mangetout in which the peas have been allowed to grow fat. You don't eat the pods, you just pop the beans out into your mouth and chew them. Delicious, but dangerous for a baby so it was up to me to pop them into my mouth and  burst them with my teeth so that they would fall apart more easily. She really loved them, so I'm now desperate to see if I can get some to keep in the freezer as that is one healthy snack, my friends. (I hardly need add that they made it through her entire digestive system with barely a dent.)

When the main courses arrived, Babybear was happy to eat slices of chicken from my meal (I had sooked the soup off first but it still had some kick), some beansprouts, bok choi, fistfuls of rice and she had great fun eating the flat rice noodles from the coconut soup.

And what joy for us, we got to eat our meals while they were still hot, hot, hot, with minimal interruption from a baby who was tickled pink to be playing with new tastes and textures. (Well, until her two new top teeth started hurting again and we made a hasty exit - but we got a good hour in there, which can't be bad.)