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Baby Bowl

Home-Cooked Meals for Happy, Healthy Babies and Toddlers

About The Book

As seen on the Today show, the coauthor of the internationally bestselling 4 Ingredient series shows how to prepare yummy, healthy food for the smallest members of the family.

Baby Bowl is the new baby food bible!

Mealtime is a fairly simple process during the first four to six months of a baby’s life. But making the transition from breast milk or formula to solid food can be a challenge for everyone, especially Mom and Dad! When do I introduce solid food to my baby? Which foods are the most appropriate for what age? How much food should I make for my baby? What do I feed to a sick child? Which foods are safe enough for my baby to eat in the car? Baby Bowl answers all these questions and offers parents a collection of healthy recipes designed to happily fill little bellies.

With three young boys of her own, bestselling cookbook author Kim McCosker has ensured that the home-tested recipes in Baby Bowl provide the love and nourishment needed for a lifetime of good eating habits. Readers will find fast, easy-to-prepare recipes, organized by age; superfoods to try and when to try them; essential advice on nutritional value; tips on how long to cook, how to serve, and whether to freeze; menu planners; and gluten-free and dairy-free recipes.

Covering a smorgasbord of delicious meals and snacks for babies from four months to a year, all the recipes in Baby Bowl are easy to follow and use only the freshest ingredients. So throw out those jars of goop and start cooking from scratch—with this book as your guide, it will be easier than you think!

Excerpt

Baby Bowl INTRODUCTION
Well, hello there! I am so very glad Baby Bowl has made it into your hands. Perhaps it has found you because you are expecting a baby, have one already, or know someone with her own baby on the way. Whatever your interest, Baby Bowl was written to help you navigate baby’s “menus” amid what is often a blur of late nights and early mornings in a cocoon of love. Ah, motherhood—the most demanding role I have ever undertaken—but the one I want to succeed at the most.

My name is Kim McCosker. I am a mother, wife, daughter, granddaughter, sister, auntie, cousin, and friend. I believe the heart of all homes is smack-bang in the kitchen. My hometown is Mundubbera, a small country town in Queensland. There were no twenty-four-hour grocery stores and any money that came our way was plowed (literally) straight back into our farm—it was not to be wasted. So my beautiful mum learned to be very creative in the kitchen, making wonderful meals from minimal ingredients. Her mum, my grandmother, a widow way too early with four kids, was the same. I learned to cook from them, so to me, food means family. My mum and grandmother made the dinner table a place to connect and communicate. It was a fun place where my brothers and I would try to create ways to get rid of peas other than by eating them (gross!). And so it is today in my house, although a lot, lot messier with my three boys (and it’s not the peas they’re protesting about, it’s the cauliflower and beets).

I have a degree in international finance; I’m an author and a businesswoman. I’d like to play golf more, help in my boys’ classrooms more often, and read the paper from start to finish just once this year. I am a really busy person who works my life and schedule around my family. I juggle many balls on any given day, doing the best I know how, sometimes successfully, sometimes dreadfully! But above all, I am just like you—a proud parent wanting to learn how to start on the right path to feeding their baby.

You may know the 4 Ingredients series I put together with my coauthor Rachael Bermingham. Actually, this book grew out of those. On tours around Australia in 2008 and 2009, doing lots and lots of author talks in hundreds of libraries, I would always ask the librarians, “What books are you regularly asked for?” The reply was often, “A baby food book.” What a great idea, I thought, and now here it is!

Baby Bowl differs from 4 Ingredients in an important way—many of these recipes have way more than four ingredients in them. “Why?” you may ask. Because, Mum and Dad, this is your moment! A stellar opportunity to offer your beautiful little babies as many vegetables and as much fruit and combinations of both as their little bellies will hold. This is the time your little angels are willing to try anything. Wait till they turn three, and the very minestrone soup they loved yesterday they completely reject today “because it’s got that green stuff in it!” “What green stuff?” you ask, astonished. Oh—vegetables!

When my boys were babies, I wouldn’t serve dinner without at least four vegetables cooked, baked, or mashed into it. So there was my “4 ingredients” quota gone in one food group!

The recipes in Baby Bowl are simple, healthy ideas aimed at introducing as many flavors to your baby’s palate as possible, before it turns into the psychotic personality it may later become (the palate, that is!). They were developed to include the goodness of each food group along with their five veggies and two fruits a day.

I have been blessed with three absolutely beautiful boys, and no amount of reading or research could have prepared me for the reality of motherhood and the enormous responsibility that accompanies it. There is so much information available these days, and for the advice of every expert another will tell you why it’s wrong! I wrote this book based on what worked for me, on advice passed from my grandmother to my mother and now to me. And guess what? With this simple gift of good nutritional sense, I have managed to raise three happy, healthy boys. (Say a prayer that this now continues!) And if I can do it, anyone can.

Where do you start when introducing solids to your baby?

With Baby Bowl—a practical, easy cookbook
written by one loving mum for others.

With love & nourishment,

Kim

About The Author

Photograph © Kim McCosker

Kim McCosker is the founder of 4 Ingredients, now a formidable Australian publishing house. 4 Ingredients has created 37 cookbooks, tens of thousands of recipes, images, vidoes, manuscripts and databases with the reach of millions. It is the publisher of cookbooks, ebooks, Apps and a developer of a various range of kitchenware. It has grown to become one of the most recognised and trusted food brands in Australia; with a reported one in seven homes owning a 4 Ingredients cookbook. In 2017, 4 Ingredients was the winner of the prestigious Best Selling Category at the World Gourmand Cookbook Awards in China. This award offered the opportunity in 2018 for Kim to cook onstage, underneath the Eiffel Tower, at the World Gourmand Cookbook Summit in Paris. With global sales nearing 9 million copies, two TV-series for Foxtel and another produced on the Sunshine Coast almost complete, more cookbooks in the works and national Ambassador roles for IGA, BETTA Home Living and Coeliac Australia, Kim and 4 Ingredients really do own the easy, everyday, cooking space in Australia. Committed to community, Kim sits on the Sunshine Coast Major Events Board, was part of the Sunshine Coast Council's Biosphere Nomination Community Reference Group, was awarded the Sunshine Coast's Most Outstanding Business Woman of the Year, 2011 and Griffith University's Entrepreneur of the Year in 2017. But most of all, Kim's proudest achievements are her family, a wonderful husband and three beautiful boys who are the lights of her life and her biggest supporters. For more information visit https://www.4ingredients.com.au/.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Atria Books (October 16, 2012)
  • Length: 160 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781451678093

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