So I went out, as advised by Rowan, to buy fish fingers but in the end could only get cod ones (don't they make haddock fish fingers any more?) which I frankly could not face eating as a Proper Meal. I did purchase them, to be fair, cos with baked beans and broccoli they are a fab lunch.
Thence to the fishmonger to get wheat were admittedly three very large fillets of haddock but my god... they cost more than a tenner. It's not like it was a gold-plated haddie or anything. Please don't lecture me about fish  populations, I know they're getting rarer.
Anyway, being British I didn't say anything other than 'ohyesthat'llbefine' and handed over my life savings. Came home, poached the fish in some milk and butter and a bay leaf in the oven, knocked up some baked potatoes and wilted some spinach. That was the first time I had used cow's milk for Babybear so I didn't give her huge amounts of the sauce when I served it up, and she appeared to suffer no ill effects.
The fish and potato was a success (as much as anything is these days now that she's on a teething-induced hunger strike) and the spinach was dropped on the floor without ever getting near her mouth. Still, as my mum used to say (in a deeply irritatin voice, as I recall)... 'More for us'.

Now, I have no idea if this is actually true or not but a good friend of mine is a nurse and she said that celery has a mild numbing effect on sore gums if served straight from the fridge. She implied that it contains some sort of anaesthetic but I've just spent 25 minutes Googling my socks off and found no actual proof of this. However, plenty of places recommend cold celery as teethers so it amounts to the same thing. (Perhaps I should take this opportunity to remind you that I am not in any sense qualified to give medical advice? Nor is Google, for that matter.)

I give Babybear half a stick at a time because she likes to put in in her mouth and yank it out, dragging it over her teeth, and the longer piece gives her better (and funnier) leverage. She loves it, and while she doesn't eat a great deal she generally chews off a good inch or so. Very handy for taking out, as it's clean and keeps well.

However, I just wanted to remind everyone that now the weather is getting colder, the days of BLW chicken soup are drawing in. In Scotland it's been bitter for a few weeks so we've had the opportunity to refine the recipe even further. Babybear is absolutely loving the big sticks of celery (still cringing with revulsion at the sight of carrot, sadly) and I appear to have cracked the 'no-salt' issue. Rather than using a stock cube to supplement my home-made chicken stock, we adults now content ourselves with sprinkling some Marigold bouillon into the soup at the table, which leaves Babybear with an utterly virtuous salt-free soup. It's not dinner party elegant, I'll grant you, but with the amount of cheese that child eats I really need to watch her salt intake.

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.)

Loved it. Home-made, of course, from canned tuna and shop-bought bread and, urm, organic cucumber from a supermarket. The Husband and I were eating them at the time, so we gave Babybear a bit off the side and she enjoyed peeling it all apart before going on to eat the constituent parts separately. We had to pile and re-pile the tuna up into the middle of her high chair tray a couple of times as Babybear's inclination is always to spread her food as thinly as possible  across whichever surface is available to her. She managed fine, though, and really enjoyed the thinly-sliced cucumber.
As with the smoked salmon, however, she did absolutely honk of fish afterwards. I don't know why I find this so disconcerting... possibly because we don't yet use soap with Babybear so the fishy memory lingers on for quite a while?

Now, I'm posting this in Finger Foods rather than Recipes because it wasn't me who made the green lentils that Babybear so enjoyed. In fact, we were round at her Auntie Jen's house playing with the magnificent Bubby when hunger struck and I, being quite the inadequate parent, had nothing with me.

Luckily, Jen was boiling up an enormous vat of big, flat green lentils and, their cooked volume having taken her somewhat by surprise, she was only too happy to give some to Babybear.

It was messy, yes, so not the best thing to eat at someone else's place but Jen, being the mother of a strapping 8-month-old, was armed with a top-class Dustbuster and so we were able to leave her relatively unscathed.

I believe the recipe was 'rinse lentils, add water, boil until cooked' with no other flim-flam, but really they were delicious. Lentils do taste nice, but I would tend to add things to them so I think I'd forgotten just how nice. Babybear grabbed them by the handful and crammed them into her mouth, clearly really enjoying them, it was a pleasure to watch. (She's recently started to hum appreciatively when she's having a good meal, it's very cute.)

The nappies, as you might expect, were interesting, but Babybear suffered no ill effects whatsoever and they are such a good source of protein that I'm going to make her some more (this time with butter and onion and sage leaves - I can't help myself) later on this week and will knock up a recipe then.

You know, I had a bad feeling about apples...

I just thought that, as adept and talented as my daughter undoubtedly is, the apple might prove her undoing... and it did. The poor wee thing gagged and choked and I was forced to do the old slappy-back thing (at the same time hopelessly aware that she was sitting in a restaurant high chair that we had practically lashed her into and that if we were ultimately required to tip her upside down we would probably have to do so by turning the entire chair over...)

I had cut it into segments, and she was really enjoying the taste and the sensation of it, but a piece broke off that was too tricky for her to handle and there were tears... (mostly mine).

Think we'll give the apples a miss until she has some top teeth and I can just hand her the whole thing to scrape on.



Post Script
Still no sign of the top teeth but at nine months old Babybear now enjoys eating her apples whole. I wouldn't have started her any earlier, thanks to our choking experience, but what I do is bite a good chunk out of and hand it to her so that she can use her bottom teeth to grate away at the open part of the apple. Very, very handy to take out with you as it is a huge time-waster, and it is rather sociable, I find, to share an apple with your child. Especially when I get to eat 90% of it.

Yes, egg. Very bold of me, don't you think? I had been thinking of waiting until Babybear got to a year old, and had been even further convinced by the news that a friend had rushed her 7-month-old to hospital after he has suffered an allergic reaction.

However, (and here's where I have to remind you that nothing I say on this site should ever, ever be interpreted as medical advice), I was then told by someone else that if your baby isn't particularly at risk of allergies that you should introduce them to at least the egg yolk so that they don't get sensitised or something..? Oh balls I can't quite remember. Perhaps the person will come along and clarify for us? Hopefully she'll remember who she is...

So that (in combination with a relatively empty fridge) decided me a couple of days ago, and I hard-boiled a couple of free-range organics for Babybear. I obeyed La Belle Delia for once, and her method (place eggs in cold water, bring to a boil, turn down to simmer and cook for 7 minutes) did not fail us.

Cracked the yolks out of the albumen, because apparently the white is more allergenic, mixed it with butter and spread it on toast. Babybear enjoyed hers enormously, but I was a little disappointed with my boiled egg whites on toast. She did fart a lot that day, I have to tell you, so I kept the rest of her meals very prune-tastic in order to, erm, even things out a bit.

...rather than Conference Pears, which is what Babybear has eaten before in the most nonplussed of manners. She's just scoffed her second Williams pear of the day, so it looks like it's a hit.

Unbelievably messy, somehow. We are talking about a simple, friendly, almost smiley yellow banana after all. Honestly, this is best served to a naked baby, but if not I would seriously recommend a combination of fabric and pelican bibs. Banana turns a particularly revolting and utterly permanent black colour on clothes, so cover up well.



I find the best way to serve a banana to my little monkey is to chop it in half across the middle and then peel it down the sides as if it were two bananas. I try not to expose more than about an inch and a half of the fruit, because otherwise it breaks off, and I snip off the excess skin with scissors. If I don't, the baby eats the skin and much as I buy fancy-schmantzy fair trade organic bananas I still don't think the skin is that desirable for her to eat.

The good thing about doing it this way is that the baby can hold onto the dry skin and eat the flesh without dropping it. She loves banana, and looks unbelievably cute while eating them (see photographic evidence, in particular Miss G).



 I have read that bananas can make babies constipated, but then I have also seen them touted as a cure for constipation so who knows? Ask your health visitor (pfffshaaahaahaw!) or instead use your cunning and well-honed maternal instincts to decide if banana has a detrimental effect on your wee one. The nappies are a big clue.
 
Post Script
About the nappies... someone posted in a complete panic on Mumsnet that their baby appeared to have contracted thread worms and that she had phoned NHS Direct. About fifteen people responded with a calm 'er, did you give her a banana?'
I'd completely forgotten the shock of seeing your first banana nappy, when Babybear got hers I actually rang my mum. Vile, I tell you, vile. And wormy.

Also, just to let you know that Babybear has long since graduated from the 'skin-on' method of banana consumption and now that her grip and dexterity has improved she just takes half of it at a time.

Take a look at the photo - priceless, isn't it? This is the face of a child who is thinking 'Mum, have you checked the ingredient list on the back of the pack?'



I hadn't, I'd just thought 'Ooooh, she might like ham. And it is from Marks and Sparks...' Anyway, her refusal to do anything other than hold it up with a rueful look on her face led me to look at the packaging. Ingredients: Ham, salt. Hmmmm, maybe another time, then.

Well, petis pois actually, because that's what we happened to have in the freezer, but we might buy ordinary-sized peas the next time. Not sure, though. One of my friends (actually the mother of the rather spendid Bubby) pointed out that peas might represent more of a choking hazard. I'll have a think about it, but she is a Canadian and they are born worriers, that lot. If I do buy the normal-sized peas, I was planning to squash them a bit in advance. Your opinions and comments will, of course, be taken into consideration as well.



Oh anyway, she was a hoot with them, though... really the cutest thing. We had microwaved the peas, covered in a bowl with just a splash of water to retain as many vitamins as possible and we served them in the gravy of the rather marvellous beef stew that I've been banging on about. By 'served', I naturally mean 'spooned elegantly onto the highchair tray'.

She grabbed for them then clasped them in her wee fist, flicking them into her mouth like a Pez dispenser. For some reason, prior to picking them up she likes to point at them, move them slowly around the table with her index finger and then make a sudden but deadly  lunge at the pile.