How many times have you opened the baby food can and realize that it is about to get empty and needs to be refilled. It might have happened to many mothers who in the process of taking care of the baby forgot to buy their baby food. There is nothing to be embarrassed of, as it’s just a mistake. But, on the other hand, there is no need to be worried about because you can actually make better baby food at home with available ingredients. Now, when we say better baby food, it is actually a better alternative to commercially available versions of baby food.
If little care is taken as to what goes into the baby food, your baby will be much healthier with home made food when compared with babies eating commercial baby food. A very simple reason to explain is that, you can actually “customize” what your baby eats each and every time and you will be the one who will give the best food to your baby. You will decide what ingredients will go into the baby food rather than picking a random baby food product.
Contrary to popular belief, commercial baby foods don’t actually give the best to your baby. Most of these baby foods contain high amounts of starch made from polished white rice. Research shows that polished white rice does not contain many nutrients as opposed to brown rice. When we look at the basic differences between brown rice and white rice, it is actually more than skin deep. Brown rice contains more nutrients than white rice.
Brown rice contains nutrients such as vitamin B1, vitamin B3 and vitamin B6, vitamin K, thiamin, niacin, panthothenic acid, manganese, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, selenium, omega-3 and 6 other fatty acids. Apart from these nutrients, brown rice is rich in dietary fiber. This makes an ideal food for not only babies but also for children and adults as well.
Rice is polished in layers. The first layer or the hull is removed away to give the brown rice. This second layer contains these nutrients, which is also milled in the process. The resulting white rice does not contain anything but starch.
Tips for preparing homemade baby food with brown rice
- Firstly, take a few cups of brown rice. Clean them thoroughly in water to remove any dirt and chemicals. After this fist cleaning, go for a second clean.
- You can add few teaspoons of mung bean or moong dal. Moong dal is a great source of protein, vitamins and minerals.
- Sun dry the rice for one or two days in intense sunlight. The sunlight is ideal in vaporizing all the moisture in the rice. Before, using this rice for further processing, make sure that the rice does not retain any moisture.
- Grind this dried brown rice into a fine powder in a mixer-grinder. You can store this brown rice powder for a considerable period of time.
- After the grinding process make sure to dry roast the powder. Roasting the powder will make it easier to cook.
· The next and the most important part is the cooking part. As brown rice and white rice are different, their cooking process is also different. Brown rice takes almost double the time to cook completely, in comparison with white rice.
· An alternate approach is to soak the rice powder in water over night. Soaking in water will drastically reduce the time it takes to cook the rice.
· For those moms, who want to make this preparation more interesting, they can add in few pinches of sugar during the cooking process. But, be cautious while adding sugar because, once if babies get the habit of eating sweet foods, it is very hard for the parents in introducing them to normal and spicy food.
· Alternatively, moms can make their baby meals much more interesting by adding mashed vegetables such as carrots, sweet potatoes, apple, banana, etc and many more.
In this way, you can make your baby food unique each time and every time.
But, before introducing new foods randomly to babies, please make sure that you introduce new foods on weekly basis and note down each of the food that has been introduced. In this way, if in any case the baby is sick, you can isolate the food that has caused the problem and avoid it until the baby is old enough to eat it.
