Equipment to make feeding tolerated allergens easier with a young infant:

  • Dr. Brown’s Silicone Feeder: We’d load the tip of one of these feeders with a very ripe piece of banana or stewed apple then put in a dallop of nut butter and then another piece of banana or stewed apple as a way to get J to eat her daily dose of nut butter.

  • Soft tip training spoon: Helpful for actually getting food in her mouth. The shape really does work well for a young infant.

  • Tiny Twinkle Mess Proof Baby Bib: This bib has been pretty amazing in keeping food off J’s torso/arms. If you want to limit potential allergen skin contact while introducing new allergens this bib plus Aquaphor on face/neck/backs of hands is the best method we found.

  • NutriBullet personal blender: We got this for making daily smoothies with nut butter and yogurt—I wanted something smaller capacity than our huge Vitamix so we could make smaller quantities more often.

  • ezpz Mini cup and straw training system: This is a 4 ounce capacity straw cup that J was able to start drinking smoothies from around 7.5 months (we held the cup, but she could sip through the straw). While it says four ounce capacity it more comfortably holds three ounces which was great for a young child—it’s tall and narrow enough that you can have just a little bit of smoothie in the cup and the straw still reaches it.

  • Infantino Squeeze Station: for filling your own pouches—a way to feed smoothies or purees with added nut butter.

  • A mortar and pestle for mashing food (like egg yolks, avocado)

  • A Vitamix or other powerful blender or food processor for making your own nut butter. Luckily we already had this, and at 11 years old it is still able to easily make homemade nut butter

  • Jars for storing homemade nut butters. One pound of nuts blended into butter fit into these 16 ounce jars well.

Ways of FEEDING NUt butter:

  • Add to smoothies*** (recipes at the end of the page)

  • Put a glob of nut butter between two ripe chunks of fruit in the silicone feeder

  • Mixing it into bean purees or yogurt or cottage cheese

  • When older—spreading it on toast/pancakes/spears of fruit, etc

Ways of feeding egg:

  • For a very young infant we found the easiest way to feed egg was to hard boil eggs and mash up the yolk with a mortal and pestle and mix it in with bean puree, mashed avocado, or cottage cheese. The egg whites of a boiled egg don’t mash well, so we didn’t use those at the start. Egg yolk has about 2.7 grams of protein.

Ways of feeding Cow dairy:

  • Yogurt

  • Very soft cheeses: cottage cheese, bits of mozzarella, ricotta cheese

Ways of feeding wheat:

  • Cream of Wheat—adding in blended fruit (like bananas/berries) to give it flavor for a young infant

Groceries to keep on hand FOr Feeding allergens to a young infant:

  • Uncontaminated nuts/nut butters to make mixed nut butter

  • Dairy: Yogurt/Cottage Cheese/Other soft cheeses

  • Wheat: Cream of Wheat

  • Black beans (to blend into puree and freeze in ice cube trays)

  • Hummus

  • Avocado

  • Veggies to steam (broccoli, cauliflower, peas, carrots, etc)

  • Frozen berries, bananas, spinach for smoothies

  • Coconut milk for smoothies

  • All the other normal baby foods!

Weekend Food Prep:

  • Make sure you have sufficient mixed nut butter prepared

  • Hard boil eggs—don’t shell! Hard boil eggs last a week in their shell. (Cover eggs with water, bring water to a boil, once boiling turn off stove and let eggs sit for 10-12 minutes)

  • Cook a batch of cream of wheat (1/4 cup cream of wheat to 1 cup water) and add in blended fruit (bananas/berries)

Smoothie Recipes:

We were making smoothies very regularly in this NutriBullet (2 cup/24 ounce) size. This smaller size blender was easier for making a smaller quantity of smoothie and thus ensuring Julia actually ate more of the mixed in nut butter rather than a lot of it going to waste. With filling to the NutriBullet smoothie cup fill line we’d end up with about 9 ounces of blended smoothie, which we would divide over 3 smoothies. If you add 1 tablespoon of mixed nut butter to the smoothie, with the hope of getting three servings out of it, then you ideally end up with her getting 1 teaspoon of mixed nut butter per smoothie serving (if she eats the whole smoothie—at 7.5 months she’s not eating 3 ounces of smoothie, but hopefully in time she will). This smoothie cup works well for holding 3 ounces of smoothie. 1 tablespoon=3 teaspoons. One tip for getting maximum nut butter in the smoothie rather than stuck on the blades of the blender is to cut a banana length wise and spread the nut butter between the banana and then put this banana/nut butter sandwich into the blender.

BERRY/BANANA/SPINACH—makes enough for three, 3 ounce smoothies.

  • 1 small banana

  • 2 strawberries

  • 1/4 cup of blueberries

  • 1/4 cup of packed spinach

  • 1/4 cup of coconut milk

  • 1 tablespoon mixed nut butter