When it's time for your baby to transition to eating food other than breastmilk, it can make you worry about a lot of things. Amongst these worries are:

- what will I feed my baby?

- when do I start adding other foods to my baby's diet?

- how much will it cost me?

- do I buy baby food or make it at home?

- how do I make sure that these new foods are clean and healthy for my baby to consume, etc?

With these doubts in mind, we have to make a decision. Most times, parents are looking for the cheapest way to feed their children. Because that's something they will be doing for a very long time. And also, parents want their baby's food to be very nutritive and healthy.

Today, I'm sharing with you my low-cost method of making baby food. It is very nutritive and will make your baby transition from breastmilk to solid food well.

How To Make Nutritious Low-Cost Pap (Baby Food) At Home

Ingredients

To compose this baby pap, you will need:

- Corn

- Groundnut

- Dry Fish

- Soybeans

- Rice

Measurements

The measurements should be proportionate to each other. Pap is usually made with corn so other ingredients are added to enrich it or make it more nutritious. So the corn can be a bit more than the other ingredients.

Value

The groundnuts and soybeans are for plant protein and the dry fish are for animal protein. You can omit the dry fish if your family is vegetarian. Rice and corn are carbohydrates and rice helps to make the pap thicker and smoother.

Preparation

All the ingredients have to be quite dry and clean. Select the grains to remove the bad grains from the good ones. Take off the scales, skin and bones from the fish.

You may fry the soybeans a little before grinding.

To make sure the grains are clean, wash them after selecting then dry them again. I dry mine in the sun.

Mix them and grind all together then they are quite dry.

NB: In Cameroon, we go mostly to grinding mills to grind a lot of things. If you are in Cameroon, make sure that you find out if your grinding mill will accept grinding the whole mixture or if they will prefer to grind it separately. In towns like Yaoundé, most grinding mills will grind all the grains, and fish mixed together but in Bamenda, most grinding mills will prefer to grind them separately before you mix them together.

This is what you get after grinding and mixing all together. This one was ground separately and then I mixed it. But sometimes when I find a place where they can grind this all at once I am so happy because it just grinds everything all together.




After grinding, you can sieve it all at once so that you will not have to sieve it every time you want to cook it.


This is how it looks like when it's cooked.


I'll show you step-by-step how I cook this baby food in the post below. 

Related: How to cook composed baby pap 

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