Blueberries with Cottage Cheese

Welcome to the world of TEXTURE Little Joy as you sample, cottage cheese! After doing a lot of research on diary and cheeses I decide to allow Little Joy to sample her first taste of cottage cheese. Most people balk at cottage cheese, but I have always loved it! As always, wholesomebabyfood.com has some great information on cheeses, when to start and what to start with.

I love the idea of Little Joy getting used to diary before we dive into cow's milk (whenever that happens). We did the 4 day wait rule with yogurt and Little Joy had no reaction-which opened us up to the world of diary. Remember, most babies do not have food aversions (in the beginning) to the tastes as much as they do the texture. I knew this going into testing cottage cheese, so I braced myself for gagging! The great thing about making your baby food from the beginning is your foods will likely not ever be perfectly smooth; I HOPE this pays off in the long run :)

4% cottage cheese is hard to find!! I got lucky and found it packaged as 4-4oz containers; this was great because I could open a small amount at a time. I am sure it is possible to make cottage cheese, but I choose certain things to buy vs. make. Although this is not a recipe here is how I tested cottage cheese with Little Joy:

Ingredients:

• Cottage Cheese (see paragraph above)
• Blueberry Puree

Steps:

• Knowing this was a big texture shock, I served up about 2 oz of cottage cheese with approximately 1/2 oz of blueberry puree. I wanted her to taste SOME of the cheese and not just all blueberry, when I tasted it, it was just a hint of blueberry.
• Stir well
• Offer to baby

Timing: 8-10 months; I would not offer this is a first diary nor as a first rich texture food.

Storage: Once you open a container, use it by the sell by date.

Miscellaneous: You could put just about any fruit puree with cottage cheese; try it out and see what your Little One likes!

Epicutie Rating: Confused-see right side of page for rating descriptions. Little Joy did not know what to do with the the lumps once they got in her mouth. She just moved it around for a while then swallowed. She took two more bites without much conviencing, but was done after that. Upon the second attempt, she took about 5 bites with lots of "yay" and "yummy". She loved it for 5 bites then realized, something was weird and was done. We will keep trying over the next several weeks.

Difficulty: 1 out of 5 since I bought the cottage cheese and used stored blueberry puree.