Batch Cooking

Traditional Chinese will tell you,"NO! You cannot do that! It will cause wind in baby's tummy!"

Honestly, I've never thought much about this. I've been batch cooking and freezing 5 years ago for my elder boy. I'm doing the same for my younger boy now. & we've never had problems with 'wind in tummy'.

The key is to heat up the porridge till it is piping hot (I use steaming).

To make cooking convenient so that we have time for the boys, we use a thermal cooker. (Read more here: http://thermalcookware.com/)
By using it's own heat to continue with the cooking process, we don't have to watch the fire or worry about burnt porridge!

This is what we do:

1. Rinse rice
2. Place washed rice and water in metal pot of thermal cooker
3. Boil vigorously for 10 to 15min
4. Cover and place metal pot into thermal sleeve5. Cover and leave to cook for a few hours

When it's ready, you can choose to boil it again if you wish, or simply portion out into freezing trays.
I'll post more about freezing trays later.

For fruits & vege, we normally cut into cubes, steam, then blend (when still at the puree stage) or mash, then freeze. We have been giving small cubes of soft food for self feeding (carrots, potato, etc).

Usually, it is recommended that you allow it to cool before popping the trays into the freezer. However, impatient as I am, I will dump them straight into the freezer. The key is to ensure that you put it AWAY from other frozen food and leave adequate space around the tray for cool air to reach it. Also, set your freezer to the coldest possible.

Why batch cook?
1. It's convenient. We don't have time to cook separate meals for baby daily. Especially when we need to ferry the elder one for classes.
2. It's easier to manage ingredients. Fresh vegetables spoil rather quickly. By batch cooking and freezing, we can extend the shelf life. Frozen food can last up to 1 month in the normal home freezer, but we recommend max 2 weeks for baby's food.
3. Variety! Imagine, we batch cook 20 different ingredients on Sunday and we play mix and match for the next 2 weeks. :) With fresh ingredients, it's pretty hard to do that.

Of course, we try to give fresh whenever we can (e.g. weekends when daddy is the driver).
Fruits are mostly fresh & breakfast usually consist of cereal and fresh fruits (mashed).

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<3 Audrey
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