7.5months. Started weaning. He accepts porridge with milk but hates mashed up broccoli or broccoli with potatoe or mashed up carrot. Any advice on what to offer? He doesn’t seem to like the taste or texture.

[BoyMumToBe34]

Help :,( I feel I fallen behind as some days he just has milk

Sweet potato, parsnips, banana, avocado. At that stage I was giving strips of toast with butter or cream cheese or avocado on.

I mean who really enjoys mashed up broccoli?

What other foods have you tried? What about fruit or bread/toast or eggs?

What do you eat? Give some tastes from your plate.

Easy things to explore:
Banana
Cucumber batons
Scrambled egg
Pasta and sauce
Cream cheese on toast
Grated apple and carrot
Slice of cheese
Blueberries (squished)
Blueberry and banana pancakes
Greek yoghurt
Strawberries
Raspberries
Sweet potato
Rice
Poached chicken
Asparagus

I know the NHS recommends broccoli, but honestly, have you ever met a child who likes broccoli?

Mine loved mashed banana and commercial baby foods.

We were told to start with cooked pureed pear, then butternut squash, then carrot - all very well cooked and pureed. Then cooked apple, potato, sweet potato, then mashed banana and avocado. Greens came a fair bit later. Might work to introduce the tiniest amount, pureed to a pulp and mixed in with sweeter veg like butternut or carrot. If he eats that, increase the amount in the mix.

If he's chewing - cream cheese on soldiers of wholemeal toast, pasta spirals dipped in tomato sauce made from passata, slices of cucumber, pear etc.

While my kids love broccoli I don’t think I tried it at that age! Sweet potato was a good base for things.

Buy the Annabel Karmel book

You’ve got a whole heap of different foods you could be trying, just move on from them! Mashed potatoes, scrambled egg, toast with various toppings (different nut butters are good), fish, chicken, omelette, squished blueberries, Greek yoghurt, sweet potato, avocado in strips or mashed or on toast, cauliflower cheese, pasta with sauce,

I recommend the what mummy makes books.

Also I swear that if your baby is going to go through the fussy toddler phase - which most do - it won’t matter a jot whether they’ve had broccoli first or not,

Mushed apple, Pear, Sweet potato, Banana

Just remember NO Honey

At 7.5 months you can just give him finger foods. No need for purées. Look up Baby Led Weaning.

did you puree it with formula milk or just water? I have a steamer and blender by Phillips but I was advised by health visitor they don’t recommend puree any more or shop bought so they had to either give it as a stick but make sure it’s steamed thoroughly or mash it. It’s so stressful. Do you give just once a day and alternative different things or start with after breakfast then add a lunch then dinner. Currently I give porridge mid morning an hour after milk

You don’t need to mash things, just make sure things are soft enough that they don’t choke on it. I just used to give little bits of things when I made for myself, eg few pieces of toast for breakfast or banana pancake, a cream cheese finger sandwich for lunch, cooked carrot sticks/few green beans/peices of salmon for dinner. Just offer little bits here and there, doesn’t have to be hard work and it’s more for exposure and textures than actually eating at that stage!

FYI you can use cows milk in cooking once you’re weaning so no need to use formula for cooking

I did do the vegetables first thing but it was pieces of pear that got him going on the finger food and pasta with cheese. DC is currently staring at a piece of watermelon like it's a bug!
Really don't worry if he eats no solid foods some days, especially if it's hot, might be just too much effort

Fucking hell, this seems like a lot of palaver. We just had an Annabelle Carman (not sure it’s correct spelling) weaning cookbook, and we just used that for all of ours. It worked. I don’t recall that things were centred around broccoli🤣. That came later when kids could be reasoned with and we had ‘little trees’ on our plates we exclaimed were brilliant and so they wanted to try.

Annabel Karmel, I think her name was. She may have had loads of recipes, but my two never got beyond her avobanana (avocado and banana mashed together.) They ate it almost every day, sometimes with Greek yoghurt stirred in. DS2 was an incredibly fussy eater, so I knew two spoons of that would have more calories in than two spoons of spat out broccoli.

Ignore health visitors. The advice changes every few years and is then insisted on as gospel. Use a mix of common sense (very little salt, very little refined sugar) and your own knowledge about your own baby.

DS2 had chronic reflux and ARFID - neither of which were diagnosed because they weren't well-known back then. If I didn't puree everything he ate until he was two years old, it came straight back up.

if your baby likes puree, give him puree. If he likes finger foods and doesn't choke on them, give him those. If he likes one veg, not another, give him what he likes. And in this sort of weather, he can survive on plenty of milk with whatever food he will tolerate.

DS2 ate only avobanana, blueberry baby rice (organic processed food) and humous mixed with greek yoghurt until he was about two. And in those days, we weaned at 3 months!

It’s fine if they don’t eat anything? Milk js their main nutrition for now. Keep offering a variety of finger foods and mashed food, just give variations of whatever you at eating. Get the Solid starts app. Would you want to eat mashed broccoli?? Don’t make specific food for the baby. Let him explore and make a mess

My 2 year old still only eats broccoli when I make ‘cheesy orzo,’ literally just orzo pasta cooked in low salt stock with cream cheese and grated cheddar mixed in to make a ‘sauce’ then I add loads of finely chopped broccoli. The cheese masks the taste!

Brocoli can be surprisingly bitter. Babies are used to milk which is very sweet.
Many poisonous plants amd berries are bitter. I have no idea if this is true but I read that evolution/natural selection has meant that children and babies tend to prefer sweet things as cave babies who preferred bitter were less likely to survive

I did baby led weaning with them both and they took to it like a dream because they did not like the lumpy textures of food being mashed up. Finger foods worked perfectly for them and they preferred it so much more just being able to pick stuff up and suck it! These are things mine loved when they first started weaning at 6 months:

Banana
Steamed apple, pear, broccoli and carrots
Steamed chicken
Pancakes
Flaky white fish and salmon
Scrambled eggs and omelettes
Toast fingers with cream cheese

Although if I could recommend one things that I still use now (my girl is 1 and by boy is 2.5), it’s the Baby Led Weaning Cookbook app. I also have the slow cooker app and the fussy toddler app by the same person but honestly my children just adored these recipes, my boy will still steal some of his baby sister’s stuff when I batch cook! All of the BLW app recipes are suitable from 6m+ and some are so quick to prepare. I did and still do batch cook 12 of something and freeze them. It was an absolute godsend for me with both of mine

Edited to add that I forgot that both mine LOVED pasta at 6 months, I’d boil it until it was really soft and mix it in with a veg or cheese sauce. I think that was both their favourites

Peas are better first green veg than broccoli, more acceptable flavour to most babies. DS's first food was mashed peas. All my attempts at giving him broccoli until he was about a year old were met with a look of disgust as he spat it out

Don't forget you can use herbs and spices too to flavour these first foods if you want, just not salt. I used to add herbs into the mashed veg and DS ate those more readily, and made a mildly spicy mashed vegetable curry that he loved and ate for lunch pretty much every day from about 7 months to over a year old.

I think you’re perhaps over thinking this a little OP.

You can give baby the same things that you’re eating just prepared in an age appropriate way, this isn’t just steamed or mashed. It’s usually more about the shape the food is.

https://solidstarts.com/foods/?hcUrl=%2Fen-US this is a really good website for showing you how different foods should be prepared for different ages.

At this age it doesn’t matter if DC don’t really eat any of the food. They’re learning about it, how to hold it with their hand, whip it crushing it or it flying out, how to have it kn their mouth and chew and swallow. It’s so much more than actually eating.

And whilst you get to choose what you offer baby, they get to choose how much they eat.

Yoghurt with mashed banana (and peanut butter), or with mashed strawberries or raspberries.