Real food for babies, children and teenagers. Nothing added to make it last longer than it should. From the first spoonful at six months to the last growth spurt at eighteen — what to feed them, and why it matters more than anyone told you.
Somebody's mother stood at a kitchen table mashing a carrot. She mashed it for a long time, until there were no bits left in it at all, and then she spooned it into a glass jar. When it was time to feed the baby, she stood the jar in a saucepan of hot water to warm it through.
She was not following a protocol. Nobody had given her a leaflet. She simply understood, in the way that people used to understand, that a baby should be fed food — and that food is a carrot, cooked and mashed, and nothing else.
This section is that kitchen table, with the reasoning written down.
Not one recipe in this section contains a preservative, an emulsifier, a flour treatment agent, a stabiliser, a "natural flavouring", or an added sugar. Not because those things are exotic or hard to avoid — but because they are in almost everything else your child is offered, and somebody should be keeping one shelf clean.
And here is the honest cost of that promise: this food does not keep.
A shop-bought baby pouch sits happily on a shelf for eighteen months. That is not a miracle of packaging — it is a consequence of what was put in it and what was done to it. Food with nothing added to preserve it behaves the way food has always behaved. It goes off.
So every recipe here carries its fridge life and its freezer life as a headline, not a footnote. Two days in the fridge. Three months in the freezer. That is not a limitation of our recipes. It is the single clearest piece of evidence that there is nothing in them.
The first foods. Smooth, single-ingredient, and iron-first — because the iron a baby was born with runs out at around six months and breast milk alone cannot replace it.
Small stomachs, enormous demands. A toddler needs more energy and fat per kilo of body weight than at any other point in life — and this is where the fussy eating starts.
School years. Lunchboxes, after-school hunger, and the age at which the modern food supply starts competing seriously for your child's palate.
The second growth spurt — the fastest since infancy. More bone is laid down between twelve and eighteen than at any other time, and most of it is never laid down again.
A recipe tells you what to cook. It does not tell you how much to give a six-month-old, which shelf the raw chicken goes on, whether that noise your baby is making is choking or gagging, or what to do if it is the first one.
Sterilising · storage and glass jars · fridge order · portions · feeding position · responsive feeding · choking and first aid · allergens · adding meat and fish safely.
These are not our preferences. They are the settled safety guidance for feeding children in the UK, and every recipe in this section is built to respect them.
Honey can carry Clostridium botulinum spores. An adult gut deals with them without difficulty; an infant gut cannot, and infant botulism is serious. This is absolute — not "probably fine in small amounts", not "cooked is safe". No honey under one year.
Under 1 year: less than 1g of salt a day. Ages 1–3: 2g. Ages 4–6: 3g. Ages 7–10: 5g. A young child's kidneys cannot handle an adult salt load. For perspective, a single slice of mass-produced bread carries around 0.4g — which is why we do not add salt to anything under one, and stay deliberately light after that.
Everything you have been told about reducing fat is adult advice, and applying it to a small child is actively harmful. Around 60% of the brain is fat, and it is being built at extraordinary speed. Full-fat milk and yoghurt, egg yolk, avocado, olive oil, nut and seed butters. Low-fat versions of anything have no place in a young child's diet.
A baby is born with an iron store built up in the womb, and it lasts roughly six months. After that, milk alone cannot supply enough. Lentils, chickpeas, beans, egg yolk and dark leafy greens — always with something containing vitamin C in the same meal, which substantially increases how much of it is absorbed. This is the single most commonly missed thing in modern weaning: the fruit-and-vegetable pouches that dominate the shelves contain almost none. Iron deficiency in the first two years affects cognitive development during a window that does not reopen.
The NHS advises a daily vitamin D supplement for all babies from birth (8.5–10μg), and 10μg for children aged one to four — and for everyone in the UK between October and March. This is the one thing that food genuinely cannot fix here, and no recipe in this section pretends otherwise.
Whole grapes, cherry tomatoes, whole nuts, raw carrot sticks, and anything round and firm. Grapes and tomatoes are quartered lengthways. Nuts appear only as smooth butters or ground. Every recipe states its texture stage explicitly.
Fatty liver disease used to take decades of adult eating to produce. Children are now being diagnosed at eight years old. Type 2 diabetes, once called adult-onset, is being found in teenagers. Not because parents stopped caring, but because the food aimed at children changed underneath them while the marketing stayed reassuring.
A fruit pouch marketed as one of a child's five a day can deliver more free sugar than a biscuit, with the fibre already broken down and the liver left to deal with the fructose. The label is not lying. It simply is not telling you the part that matters.
This section is the practical answer to that. Not a warning — a kitchen. Read what is actually happening to children's livers →