Two weeks to go until my book launch, I’ve had a lovely lady call the office today to ask about the book as she has a 7 month old and wanted to know if it really was no faffing recipes. It really is, honest. The recipes are all based on the food I cooked for my three children who are now 15, 11 and 9.
When you have one child and you’re on maternity leave you have time to cook – providing your baby sleeps and providing you are sensible enough to go back to bed and sleep at the same time as your baby working on the principle that you’re only going to get 4 hours in one go if you’re lucky.
Even with one baby the only time you’re going to get to prepare food and cook is when they’re asleep which means that you are going to miss out on potentially 4 hours sleep, you never know when your next sleep is going to come so this potential sleep time is very precious and in a lot of cases rare. Do you really want to spend that ‘sleep time’ cooking, ‘no’ so the idea with this book is that the recipes can be adapted for all the family and they can be prepared ahead, just about all of them frozen in bulk and taken out of the freezer when needed – you get to sleep, yeay!
Once you get to 2 or 3 children the whole concept of cooking and preparing food goes out the window, so does the concept of sleep, as a new Mum you know you’re not going to sleep for the next 12 months so when you have the choice of sleep or cook, sleep gets it every time, or it should. Jars come in handy, apart from when you have a child like my middle one who totally and completely refused anything out of a jar, even apple puree, no idea how she knew but she did. Nightmare. She started on spag bol at a very early age, the issue now is that tomatoes are not recommended for babies under 12 months due to their acidity. I had to get creative to come with alternative family meals without tomatoes for the first 12 months.
It’s a minefield working out what baby can and cannot eat, more so as the goalposts change frequently. I’ve written a section about the new ‘baby led weaning’ craze – sorry anyone out there who thinks this is a great idea, I don’t, at all, no way. I want to know how much food my baby is eating and the concept is great but mixed with normal pureed food too otherwise you’re either going to feed the whole family stick veg and finger food or prepare different meals again, no, no, no. Sorry, feel a rant coming on.
However, it could be very funny serving up your partner with finger food when he comes home from work, I’d love to see is face, getting a fit of the giggles just thinking about it. Actually, maybe that’s what we should do, just to try it out, go on, if you do please tell me how it goes.
I’m thinking of digging out my old baby diaries and blogging them, taking you through day to day with babies from a while ago, could be interesting so watch this space.
In the meantime, preregister for the book, it’s on Amazon on pre-order and currently making it into the top 100,000, out of 5.2 million books that’s not bad seeing as it’s not even launched yet.