Mums and Babies

Creamy Cheesy Chicken Weaning Recipe

Delicious and a great first taste for your baby. Try little bits of chive in it, but try and use something that’s not too strong. Don’t use salt – and try hard to find an unsalted cheese. Your baby needs nutrition, but also needs interesting new tastes, so you could experiment. Try grilling the chicken for a different flavour.

Ingredients:

• 60g chicken (use breast as it’s less sinewy)
• 30g grated cheese (use cheddar)
• 2 or 3 broccoli florets
• 2 or 3 cauliflower florets
• 1 carrot
• 15g butter
• 1 tbsp. plain flour
• 125ml milk

Method of Preparation:

For this weaning recipe, put the vegetables in a saucepan full of boiling water. If you would like flavour, try a tiny bit of chicken stock, but use proper chicken stock and not a cube as these are salty.

Cook this until tender and not hard. It needs to be soft to puree properly.

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the flour in and mix together to form a paste. Pour in the milk slowly, stirring all the time, until everything is fully combined and not lumpy.

Take this off of the heat and mix in the cheese. It will melt on its own.

Mix the chicken and the vegetables in the sauce. Make sure they are cut into small pieces, if you are pureeing this for a very young baby, 4 months to 7 months. It makes it much easier to puree if they are in small pieces already.

If you are serving this to a baby over 7 months, you can keep the chicken and vegetables whole, but chopped up small.

You could also try substituting the chicken for turkey. It is similar texture and taste to chicken, but a slightly different flavour. It is as lean as chicken. Again, use breast meat as it is less sinewy.

You can serve this cool, or you can serve this warm. Try it with warm rice for those slightly older babies, and if you want to incorporate a carbohydrate for the smaller babies, you could puree some cooked rice in with the chicken mixture, or you could puree a small new potato or two to thicken out the mixture.

Another variation is to try a couple of different ingredients. You could add a few chestnut mushrooms, or maybe try some small amounts of spinach.