The Healthy Baby Meal Planner by Annabel Karmel

By Annabel Karmel; 208 pages.

Subtitle: Mom-Tested, Child-Approved Recipes for Your Baby and Toddler.

Overall, I wish the recipe ingredients and cooking methods in this book had been more wholesome and the advice safer, less confusing or at least accurate. With the word healthy placed front and center in the title, I guess I expected a lot more than what this book delivered.

This book follows the familiar format of many baby and toddler cookbooks. Several chapters are devoted to starting solids, weaning and basic purees, then it moves on to include chunkier fare for toddlers.

Nearly all the recipes in the book are simple, easy-to-make and use ingredients that are probably already in your pantry. If you don't have them on hand, these ingredients are not going to be hard to find at the grocery store. I found that most of the recipes will please everyone in the family and not just your baby or toddler. This is a big plus over other cookbooks in this genre. Colorful pictures of some recipes are available so you can see what your finished product might look like. The recipes don't require much specialized equipment since many that are intended for toddlers require only baking, boiling or sautéing.

The highlight of this book is definitely in the recipes, though they do tend to include a lot of refined or processed products (ketchup, white flour, sugar, white rice, pasta that isn't made from whole wheat, etc.) and Karmel even discourages giving toddlers high-fiber foods. Overall, I feel the entire book falls flat due to this type of nutrition advice.

Some of the advice is simply confusing. For example, most books make a clear distinction between breast milk or formula and cow's milk. This book seems to use the term almost interchangeably. The meal planning table for babies in the first stage of weaning indicates they should still be having breast milk or formula, but the tables for the 7-to-9-month-old baby and the 9-to-12 month old indicate milk only. It is also suggested that if your 7-to-9-month-old baby somehow doesn't like the 21 ounces of breast milk or formula necessary in a day, you can just use milk in recipes. (What milk? Cow's milk? It's unclear.) I have to wonder, too, what child in this age range dislikes the very food that has been nurturing them since birth? It seems to me that this advice should be intended for a child older than 12 months who has weaned from the bottle and is taking whole milk, yet it is placed in the chapters for younger babies instead.

Other advice I found disconcerting or downright dangerous included encouraging those with a lactose intolerant baby to stop breastfeeding and substitute soy formula instead, giving whole carrots to babies as young as 9 months, and giving popcorn, gum drops, and large marshmallows to toddlers.

Another thing I found troubling (even though there are many vegetarian or easily adaptable recipes) was the half-hearted mention of feeding a vegetarian diet. There were perhaps 2 paragraphs in the entire book regarding this and nothing at all about a vegan diet. I think this is strange treatment for two of the healthiest types of diets for children and adults. I would expect that sort of information in the first edition printed in 1991, but not this updated edition printed in 2009.