One really great use of Thrive Life foods is for baby food!   Unlike “fresh” foods, they’re highly portable (no refrigeration, etc. needed).  Unlike jarred foods, they don’t have a bunch of weird additives (and nutrients are preserved better through freeze-drying than through canning).  And you can vary the serving size however you need; you aren’t limited to a specific package size.

This is true even for meats, which I prefer to introduce early, but which can be a little tricky to manage with a young baby, in practical terms.

But this is really simple.  Grind or smash up whatever the food is, before reconstituting it.  Add the liquid and give it time to absorb.  Then serve.  You have basically an on-demand puree this way, of any food we carry.  (Use common sense.  I don’t recommend serving a baby onion puree, for instance.)

Beef “Baby Food”

With my apologies for the fact that this is not a particularly visually appealing food, here’s what this looks like for beef.  I grabbed a couple chunks of shredded beef out of our Simple Plate meal (mostly because I forgot to order beef this month in preparation for introducing solids).

I crushed it well.

Then I added water to make a (not-very-appetizing) puree.

You can literally make just a teaspoonful for introducing a new food to baby for the first time (when it’s more about the taste than “filling up”), or a quarter of a cup for a bigger baby who’s hungry and wants something more filling.

Want it really pureed?  Grind it so it’s really well powdered.  Not so much?  Leave some chunks before reconstituting.  Have you already introduced a variety of individual foods?  Then have fun and mix some things together.

Snacking

For an older baby/toddler, there are additional options for snacking.  Freeze-dried foods as-is make good snacks.  They’re crisp and crunchy, but most also mush up well enough inside the mouth to not be a choking hazard.  Freeze-dried fruits like apple slices and bananas are an obvious option (I recommend avoiding berries for this purpose, as a rule, just because of the messy staining), but veggies can be surprisingly popular, too.

We also have freeze-dried yogurt bites that are not dissimilar to the yogurt bites you can buy in the toddler snack aisle, but they’re heavily sweetened so I would probably not use them, myself.

(Our bib, in the photo, is a Bumkins SuperBib.  I love these so much that I actually got rid of all our other mealtime bibs and only have SuperBibs.)