Your weaning journey: M&S recipes for every age and stage

Whether your baby is about to experience their first flavours, or you need a little inspiration for an increasingly hungry 10-month-old, our recipes are here to help.

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M&S Food

When a baby is around six months old, holding their head steadily while sitting, has a little hand-eye coordination and is keenly eyeing every morsel that passes your lips, it’s time to start weaning.

If you're just getting started, the NHS website has all the information you might need about baby’s readiness, useful equipment and how and when to feed, as well as advice on purées and baby-led weaning.

Starting solids is very much a process, and there is never any rush to move on from where you are – your child has a long future of eating food ahead of them, after all. Whatever stage you’re at, our weaning recipes will keep you inspired along the way.

First tastes

These are likely to be mostly single fruits and vegetables for at least a couple of weeks. The NHS says to “try mashed or soft-cooked sticks of parsnip, broccoli, potato, yam, sweet potato, carrot, apple or pear” and to “include vegetables that are not sweet, such as broccoli, cauliflower and spinach”.

So baby’s first foods might be very smooth purées, or they might be mashed, or you might choose to give your child easy-to-hold pieces of avocado, or florets of cauliflower, or slices of peach – or you might do a combination of all three.

You’ll feel your way through it. And after you’ve introduced lots of single flavours, you’ll start mixing them together in – for instance – our choose-your-own-adventure berry compote, a recipe so useful it will stay with you through the first year and beyond.

More ideas here

Exploring textures

You’ll gradually introduce starchy foods, pulses, fish, eggs, meat and cheese and your baby will meet a veritable wonderland of textures. As they adjust to the lumps and squishy bits in their food, you can continue to mash or purée to whatever texture they’re up for at the moment.

Some recipes that will adapt with you as you begin to do this are our herby white beans, which have just five ingredients (butterbeans, olive oil, garlic, lemon and herbs) but bags of flavour, and can be easily mashed, semi-mashed or fully mashed, as you like.

Oats are the ultimate early texture for babies, especially if they’re left to soak overnight, as in our bircher muesli recipe, which is flavoured with cosy apple and cinnamon, and can be dressed up with yogurts and smooth nut butters – a little textural odyssey.

More ideas here

Finger foods

The NHS recommends finger foods from the very beginning, as a way of helping your child feel involved at the table and giving them opportunities to explore.

Again, at the start of weaning, these will be simple single ingredients – a piece of tenderstem broccoli or a strip of hard, pasteurised cheese – but over time, you’ll want to incorporate cooked foods that babies can easily hold.

You can cut our little cheddar biscuits into easy to hold strips, or whatever shapes you think they can manage. And our potato and kale cakes are cute grabbable circles, perfect at any time of day.

More ideas here

Three meals a day

It may not be long before you suddenly feel like bits and bobs are no longer cutting it – you officially have a whole mouth to feed. Soon enough, baby will be eating three meals a day and it can help you to get ahead, especially with dinner.

Our sweet potato and spinach dahl is absolutely packed with vegetables and freshness – it’s the lemon and coriander at the end that makes it. You’ll always feel good reaching for a batch of this in the freezer – the recipe makes six to eight portions but you could even double it.

The pearl barley risotto is another satisfying dinner worth making in mini batches, with frozen peas, mint, salmon and parsley – so many flavours, so many textures, so much fun.

Remember when baby was just eating one vegetable at a time? Your weaning journey – what a ride.

More ideas here

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Published 8.15.2024

Your weaning journey: M&S recipes for every age and stage

First tastes

Exploring textures

Finger foods

Three meals a day

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