This delicious homemade Zucchini + Potato Baby Food Puree is soft and creamy, making it a great first puree to introduce to baby! It is great baby food for 6 months and up—stage 1 puree.
I just finished the book French Kids Eat Everything by Karen Le Billion and was struck by how many of the French rules about educating your child on food and eating resonated with me. The original reason I started reading the book was that instead of eating her dinner, little E would just throw handfuls of food, her plate, spoon, and sippy cup at us, well, mostly at my husband. This behavior needed to stop so I needed to do some research on how I wanted to approach this situation. After reading this book and putting some of the French rules into place, this problem stopped the very next day. But we will go more into depth about this later because there is just so much that I loved about this book and want to share with you.
Instead, I want to talk about one of the things that surprised me in the book, how French parents do their purees. They start with only pureed vegetables and thinned down to an almost milk-like consistency. That is not the surprising part; the surprising part is that they use many vegetables that you are not likely to find as a baby puree on any grocery market shelves or vegetables that I would have ever thought of making into a baby puree – red peppers, leeks, zucchini, asparagus, brussels sprouts fennel and celery root [which I wasn’t even sure what this was]. Some are mixed with a little bit of potato to thicken them up, but most are served by themselves. They also categorize the purees into purees that have a mild taste and purees that have a more pungent taste. Leeks, zucchini, potatoes, celery root, and potatoes are all vegetables with a mild taste. Red peppers, peas, carrots, fennel, and broccoli are all vegetables with a strong taste. Their theory is that you start with the mild vegetable purees first and then move on to the strong-tasting purees, building the thickness as you go.
Reading this book changed my perspective on how many vegetables you can give your baby from the beginning. I am not sure why my view on this was so limited. It makes sense that if you want your child to learn to love all of their vegetables, you have to start them all from the very beginning. Plus all vegetables are filled with tons of nutrients your baby needs to grow. Why limit their vegetable intake to only peas and carrots? Let’s widen our horizons on the selection of vegetables we get at the market and make into purees. Let’s widen our view on what vegetables we want our kiddos to love. Let’s do it together.
So, I started with a simple zucchini puree with a bit of potato. I left the skin on the zucchini because that is where most of the nutrients are found and steamed them both for less than 20 minutes. what I made was a simple, mild puree that was silky and smooth and beyond satisfying to not only my baby pallet but also to mine. You could add a little cream or olive oil and serve this warmed as a starter soup for your entire family. Yes, it was that good.
ZUCCHINI & POTATO BABY FOOD PUREE
Ingredients
- 3 small zucchini trimmed and roughly chopped
- 1 small white potato roughly chopped
Instructions
- Bring 2 inches of water to a boil in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Place the potato into a steamer basket over the boiling water, cover and cook for 10 minutes.
- Add in the zucchini on top of the potatoes, cover and cook for another 7 minutes or until potatoes and zucchini are tender. Do not over cook the potatoes. Reserve steamer water. Let cool slightly.
- Place the zucchini and potato into a blender or food processor and puree for 1 minute or until completely smooth, adding the reserved steamer water into the puree in 1 tablespoon increments if needed.
Notes
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