Anyone make meat puree?

[GreenMomPhD]

DD is 6.5 mo and I'm going to start solids maybe in a month or two.  I'm not going to do any rice cereal; I was thinking to start w/ banana or avocado.  W/ my 1st, I did do cereal and I made my own food for her, like pureed fruits and veggies.  I have read that meat puree is a good first food, but I don't want to buy any jarred food that I don't make or know how it's made.  Does anyone make their own meat puree?  How do you do it? Thanks!

[Knitting Mama]

We didn't do purees. I started with fruits and veggies, and then around 9 months she started eating small amounts of meat. I just would cook it in the crock pot so that it was super soft. Works well for us!

[JudiAU]

Meat is a good source of heme iron and thus at least one Candian provence recommends it. Personally, the thought of meat puree is gross. Some people offer a very large chunk, like a lamp chop, as teether. Some people wait until small pick up pieces are appropriate (like we did). Some people use a not so fine tabletop food meal and blend whatever the family is eating (stew/noodles/carrots) (like my mom).

[Hannah32]

I'm sort of lazy, so we buy most of our baby food, but the meat puree stuff seems like it would be gross, be it from a jar or homemade. I am more apt to save little bits of meat for my son. He takes meat that way. 

[staceychev]

We either give very soft cooked meat that she can pick up with her hands, or we mix together everything on the table in a food mill and she usually loves that. Last night it was roast chicken, quinoa, broccoli and gravy.

[Llyra]

I made meat puree for my twins sometimes, largely as a source of iron. I was concerned about their iron stores, because I was so horribly anemic in the third trimester, and they were born early to boot. I made browned ground meat and put it in the food mill with some of drippings to moisten it. Usually I mixed it with some vegetables, too, and some of the water I cooked the vegetables in, also to give it a moister texture. Carrots work nicely if you cook them until they're very soft, or sweet potato. You get something that looked a lot like dog food (lovely, I know) but it tastes fine, and they seemed to like it a lot. I also sometimes food milled whole meals-- I remember food-milling a whole Thanksgiving dinner, for DS. He wolfed it down.

Later on when they could tolerate the acid of the tomatoes (I dunno-- maybe ten months? I'm not a big follower of when baby should be eating what) we used to make spaghetti sauce with meat, and then run the sauce through the mill to make the texture easier for them. You can even throw the pasta right in the mill with the sauce.

Chicken cooked slowly in liquid will also get soft enough to puree nicely.

I am in principle a big fan of baby-led weaning- where you skip the purees, and just let them start by feeding themselves table food. We didn't do a lot of purees. But my twins loved food so much, from about eight months old, and some things were just too difficult for them to manage without the food mill to help.

[MJB]

We do pieces of meat, but I've also added meat to veggie purees. I made one batch of baby food with spinach, carrots, and chicken tossed in the blender. It tasted pretty good and was made from stuff I had sitting in the fridge (half a chicken breast my 5 yr. old didn't finish, some baby carrots that were getting dry, and frozen spinach).