The Grow Well Kitchen/How To Do Stuff
The Practical Part

How To Do Stuff

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. This section does.

Most of what follows is not complicated. It is simply not written down anywhere in one place, and a great deal of it gets passed on wrong — by well-meaning relatives working from advice that has since reversed, and by packaging that has a commercial interest in what you believe.

Everything here follows current UK guidance. Where the guidance has changed — and on allergens it has changed completely — we say so plainly, because you are going to be told otherwise by somebody who loves you.

⚠️ Read the choking page before you start solids

Not after. Before. It covers the difference between gagging and choking — which most parents do not know, and which matters enormously — and what to do in the moment. It is the one page in this section that is genuinely urgent.

The six pages
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Choking, Gagging & First Aid

Gagging is loud and protective. Choking is silent. Knowing which is which changes what you do — and knowing what to do buys the minutes that matter. Includes the technique for babies under one and children over one.

Read this one first →
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Safety, Storage & Hygiene

What actually needs sterilising and what does not. Glass over plastic and why. Fridge shelf order, the two-hour rule, reheating once, and why you never feed straight from the storage jar.

Read →
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How To Actually Feed a Baby

Position, portion, pace. How much is a first portion, really. Whether to wake a sleeping baby to feed. And responsive feeding — why the last spoonful "for mummy" is the one thing worth unlearning.

Read →
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Allergens — The Advice Reversed

For years parents were told to delay peanut and egg. That advice was wrong, and delaying now appears to increase risk. Introduce early, from six months, and keep them in. How to do it, and what a reaction looks like.

Read →
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Fussy Eating

There is a texture window that shuts at ten months, a suspicion phase that peaks at two, and a line where fussiness becomes something a GP should see. Almost nobody is told where that line is. Includes what the research actually says about offering food again — and it is not ten times.

Read →
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Adding Meat & Fish Safely

Nutriofia's food database is plant-based, but plenty of families feed meat and fish and have every right to. Core temperatures, bone checking, the mercury list, liver and vitamin A, and cross-contamination.

Read →

The six things, if you read nothing else

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This is general information, not medical advice. It follows current UK public health guidance but it cannot know your child. Your health visitor, GP, midwife or a registered paediatric dietitian knows things about your baby that no website does — including whether they were premature, how their growth is tracking, and what any existing diagnosis means for feeding. Ask them first, and ask them freely. It is what they are there for.