Food feature: Cookery lessons for mums

Wednesday 10th March 2010

Mark Taylor meets the young mum who hosts home cookery lessons for parents that are specially tailored to meet the needs of their babies

As any parent or carer knows, cooking for young children can be challenging at the best of times. We all want our children to eat healthy, nutritious meals instead of ready-made baby food but many parents don’t have the time or the basic cooking skills.

Now, help is at hand thanks to the Bristol-based company Baby Bites, run by former chef Louise Barnard.

From her house in Bishopston, mother-of-one Louise runs informal cooking classes for parents and carers who want to learn how to cook delicious food for their children from the weaning stage onwards.

The classes are small and relaxed, with parents allowed to bring their babies and toddlers along if they want to as a safe soft play area is provided.

Baby Bites is all about giving people the confidence, knowledge and support to feed your baby simple and nutritious meals at home.

As Louise points out, commercially-made jars of baby food may be cheap and convenient, but they are no substitute for the real thing.

“Ready-made baby food has sometimes been sitting around on a shop shelf for longer than your baby has been alive.

“A lot of parents think babies like bland food but children have good palates and they like interesting flavours and textures so it’s good to get them excited about food from an early age.

“A lot of mums say they wouldn’t dream of eating the jars of baby food they buy for their babies so why are they giving them to their children from such a young age? It’s baffling.”

For Louise, 29, teaching people how to cook for their children was a natural progression after 10 years spent as a chef.

After working in a few Bristol restaurants, she ran a catering company in Taiwan and then worked as a personal chef in Monaco, the Alps and on the French Riviera.

She moved to France to work but returned to her hometown of Bristol when her son Oscar, now 15 months old, was born.

“I didn’t want to get back into cheffing because of the long hours and people kept asking me to teach them how to cook.

“I realised a lot of parents were struggling and a lot of people didn’t know where to start, perhaps because they weren’t getting much help from their health visitors.

“Not everybody has the time to cook every night, but they want to give their children the best.”

One of the common mistakes new parents make is assuming that cooking a meal for their baby or child will involve a lot of extra work, but Louise says the key is to make a family meal using fresh fruit and vegetables and then just adjusting the portion-size, texture and seasoning to suit the baby or child.

“I started feeding my own recipes to Oscar while weaning him,” says Louise, who lives with her carpenter boyfriend Tali.

“I realised that there were a number of parents who wanted to cook for their children but simply lack the confidence or skills in the kitchen.

“A lot of people think they have to cook a separate meal for their babies but it’s going to be a lot easier to cook one family meal and simply leave out the salt or chilli until the end of the cooking.

“My son has always eaten things like tagines, fish pie and casseroles from an early age. The trick is to use lots of herbs, spices and lemon to make it tasty without having to add salt and sugar.

“One of the most successful dishes at Baby Bites has been the baby curries, things like korma or dhal using coconut milk and lentils, which are spiced with warm, gentle spices like garam masala or cumin.

“Those combined with the creamy coconut milk make the curries very popular with babies and then you can add meat or chicken at the end as they get older.”

Baby Bites runs a range of workshops, from ‘pure and simple purees for weaning’ to ‘the early years and beyond’ for older children.

Workshops run for between 90 minutes and two-and-a-half hours and cost between £20 and £40 per person depending on the workshop.

Louise says there is also a ‘green’ aspect of cooking nutritious meals from scratch, rather than buying bland, pasteurised baby food from the shops.

For a start, there is less waste (no throwing away half-eaten jars) and it’s better for the environment as there is less processing, packaging and food miles.

“The benefits of home cooking, over commercial baby food, are enormous,” says Louise. “Fresh, homemade food tastes better and teaches children to appreciate real food from the first bite.

“It’s also cheaper in the end because cooking one meal for the whole family is always going to be more cost effective.

“Homemade food tastes better, it’s real food full of texture and flavour and you know the quality of the produce that went into it. It also contains more nutrients as it hasn’t been pasteurised to give it a long shelf life.”

The Baby Bites classes are open to everybody, regardless of their cooking skills or knowledge.

“They have also become very social events, with participants using it as a chance to meet other new parents.

Says Louise: “Some of the mums and dads who come to me can cook but don’t know what to cook for the babies, others have no idea about cooking full-stop so we cater for everybody.

“Some people just need more inspiration and it has also become quite a social thing because we do groups of four people and it’s an opportunity for people to get together and talk about their babies and food.”

Louise also plans to launch an organic baby food delivery service in the autumn, delivering homemade dishes to people’s doors across Bristol.

“Lots of people want to cook good food for their babies but don’t have the time, or perhaps don’t want to be cooking five nights a week.

“The idea is to deliver fresh or frozen baby meals straight to the door a bit like a vegetable box scheme. I’ve already had a lot of interest from people.”

Looking at the wider picture, Louise also says that she hopes people attending Baby Bites workshops will also hand on their skills to their children.

“If nobody teaches them how to cook, this generation of children will miss out, as will their children. If they don’t see their parents cooking at home, they won’t cook for their children either, which is very worrying.”

For more information about Baby Bites, go to www.babybites.co.uk or call 07531 237 527.