Rating: 
Summary: Food I would Eat Myself
Review: After skimming through many baby feeding books I chose this one because the food it shows is food we eat - only a much more healthy version. The author doesn't seem to have any agenda against any type of food. The author just talks about making good, nutritious food that your child will enjoy without any extra commentary on the evils of white flour or junk food. I also liked the color photos of what the food looks like and the fact that she includes FLAVOR in the dishes - not just pureed steamed broccoli, but casserole dishes that begin with you sauteing leeks, or flavoring with peppercorns (dishes for older babies)There are a lot of parsnips & rutabegas in the recipies but once we tried them, we liked them and now make them part of our diet as well as our son's
Rating: 
Summary: Cute but useless.
Review: I loved the pictures in this book. I loved leafing through it and admiring all the hard work at presentation the photographer and author had obviously done in their dainty animal face pizzas and artistic food presentation. I hope their babies appreciated it. Mine doesnt give a hoot if his cheese looks like a star or a cow or a rocket or if I put little olive eyes on his smiling pizza face. Frankly, who has the time for this!
I did find some nice recomendations in the infant feeding section on how to mix different veggies in purees and but most of the recipes had me going " who in the world is going to sit around doing that!" Kudos on the pretty pictures but if you are a harried mom trying to get food on the table for a screaming toddler, pass this one on.
Rating: 
Summary: YUM!
Review: I have this book for when my 3 month old is ready to start solids, although I have 2 older children I have experienced feeding with already. After reading through I found it very informative. However, it does not give as many recipes for the the beginning stages as I would have liked. Nor do I think I will actually use any of those listed for the toddler stages as they are too labor intensive. Still it is nice to know there are alternatives to the jar on the shelves at your local grocery store!
Rating:
Summary: Glossy But Disappointing
Review: There is no question that this is an attractive book -- filled with large, glossy photos of foods cut into fanciful shapes and arranged into whimsical tableaux. (Canelloni in a sleeping bag, anyone?) But if you're looking for solid, medically-approved information on what to feed a child under a year old, this is not the book for you. There are some dangerous shortcomings to the advice here. A lot of the foods are recommended for ages commonly considered not appropriate. Berries, fish and shellfish, egg whites and citrus fruits are all allergenic and should not be served before a year old. Many of these items are suggested in recipes for babies as young as 6 months. The author also suggests dairy at 6 months old -- my doctor, at least, only just gave the OK at 9 months, and some doctors prefer to wait even longer. That said, if you take the advice with a grain of salt and consult your pediatrician first, then the book may serve you well. It provides interesting ways to combine and present foods, which for a picky eater, and for older children, may make it worthwhile.
Rating:
Summary: Still using it after 4 1/2 years!
Review: I bought this book when my first child was born in 1998 because I wanted to make all her baby food. The recipes in this book are really good! From the time she was 4 months old she started eating many recipes from this book. Same thing with my now 2-year old son. I'm proud to say that I didn't have to resort to jarred baby food for either of my kids! Of particular interest to me were the tips on freezing baby food. I would make several batches of different things (especially the 9 months and under sections), freeze them in ice cube trays, then transfer to a heavy-duty ziptop bag and place in the freezer. Then I just would take 2-3 ice cubes' worth of food, defrost and feed. We still use many of the recipes from the book. All the nugget and croquette recipes are just absolutely delicious!! Even my husband and I have enjoyed them (particularly the chicken "snails"). Now I rely a lot on the age-by-age menus in the back of the book to get ideas on what to feed my kids every week. O.K., maybe I wouldn't recommend this book for those who don't enjoy cooking. All the recipes are "from scratch". But if you're an average or better cook and want to give your children a great start nutrition-wise, this book's for you. I didn't find that the recipes in the latter sections were more time consuming than what the book indicated.
Rating:
Summary: It's pretty good
Review: This book seems a little daunting at first, especially if you're on the fence about making your own baby food or not. Some people object to some of the recipes having butter or onions. But I took a second look and decided to try some things. The early recipes are very easy. The second-stage ones are easy too, I found out. Most things are simmered til soft, then pureed in a blender. True, there is some butter and onions included, but when I realized that each recipe made several servings, the amount of butter my baby was receiving in each feeding was nearly negligible. Also, I simply cut out the butter, oil, onions, and the like when I didn't feel it was necessary. A lot of these have carrots and potatoes as a base for introducing other things like fish and cottage cheese, so the diet gets changed gradually. Recipes are indicated to be suitable for freezing or not, a big help. The author seems a little too cutesy with the presentation. I can't imagine myself making litle animal faces at each meal for the next 5 years. They're just suggestions I guess. So don't think you have to do this whole book or else. Some recipes seem unnecessarily complicated, like poaching fish in a flavored broth. Plain water is fine. Simplify where you like to make it manageable for yourself, and really it's not too hard to make your own baby food.
Rating:
Summary: Great for baby, with a few shortcomings
Review: First Meals seems to be about how a Cordon Bleu chef, obsessed with nutrition, cooks for her own kids. It is very healthful approach to infant's needs, challenging to the ordinary mom's cooking skills, and tends to yeild a few disappointments the more you use it. I started using this book for my 8 month old son about 5 months ago, with great results-- at first. The baby is in excellent health and spirits, after eating home prepared baby food that was easy to make. Ms Karmel's baby recipes are wonderful, resulting in foods far superior in smell and taste to what comes in jars. The first sets of recipes taste good: Ms. Karmel is dead on when she gives advice about the foods that babies like. My son really does enjoy parsnips, for example. I am grateful for the first sections of the book, where Ms. Karmel opened my family's world to a lot of new and healthy foods. In addition to this, the charts and suggestions I found dead on for my son's introductions to solids, as well. His pediatrician has approved of all the advice for feeding my son that was in this book, so for my infant's needs, this was a very happy fit. Ms. Karmel's recipes for toddlers and older children did produce some disappointments, unfortunately. While the time allowances for the baby foods and purees were accurate, it took me much, much more time to prepare foods in the latter sections than was indicated by the recipe. In addition to taking more time than she allows, many of the latter recipes simply didn't taste very good. This was particularly inconvenient, because many of the recipes in these sections are merely variations of each other, sometimes resulting in one flop after another. Ms. Karmel's Tomato Soup, for example, was a busy mom's nightmare. It called for three steps of proceessing and after two hours of cooking and a big mess to clean up, I ended up with soup that was less than tasty. Both of my sons refused to eat it (and I didn't blame them.) Other recipes suffered because they simply call for too much onion, in my opinion. For example, my whole family found the Turkey Balls and Pepper Sauce particularly objectionable, being too spicy and greasy. My final complaint is that the recipes are too fatty for the whole family to enjoy. I know that this is good for the baby, but it seems to me that a Cordon Bleu chef can invent some way to adapt the recipes for so that you could prepare meals for not only your baby, but for older kids and adults at the same time. Ms. Karmel should also become more aware of how much time her recipes really do call for, including clean up time afterward. Not all of us are trained cooks working in a well equipped lab kitchen. In sum, I like this book and use it, but I think it could be more realistic about the cooking needs of an average family. I don't want my children's memories to be of me slaving away at a stove. I want more time to play with my kids; I'd like to cook once for everyone and get it over with! That in mind, I'd like to see a revised edition of this book that includes more basic recipes for the whole family to enjoy. I would like to learn how to modify the recipes so that my baby can get the fat he needs, but in a format that can be modified for my husband, my older son and myself.
Rating:
Summary: Good could be imrpoved
Review: The recipes are very good and the information is also excellant (I would check with your peditrician about possible food allergies on some recipes). However the book could use an easier format and more pictures.
Rating:
Summary: Bye-bye Gerber, Hello Great Dining!
Review: I made all of my son's baby food ever since he started solids at six months old. After you've made all the standard veggie and fruit purees, you start to wonder "What should I feed him now?" This book is great! I have a 14 month old kid who will happily scarf down a sweet potato/carrot/broccoli mix, who will devour a bowlful of Baby Bolognaise, who eats a healthy muesli for breakfast, and who shuns tater tots and shakes his head NO at the boxed macaroni & cheese. If only WE ate that well! :D I sincerely believe that feeding him fresh foods early on gave him an expectation for fresh foods; feeding him pre-packaged foods would have given him the expectation for pre-packaged foods. This carries on through toddlerhood; what are they used to? I'm VERY pleased with the book...my only complaints are: (A) The timetable assumes you are starting your baby on solids at four months. TOO SOON! The AAP recommends not starting solids AT ALL until six months. So you're making food for your six month old and looking up recipes under the "Four to Six Month" section. I would like the AAP's recommendations taken more seriously, as it reduces the chances of food allergies for Baby. (B) Parsnips? Hey, my grocery store doesn't even CARRY parsnips! Some of this stuff seems pretty exotic, especially to those of us who can't (or don't) cook. Most of it is OK, though, and I'm often surprised at how easy the recipes really are.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't buy this book!!!
Review: I try some of the receipts for my twins. They don't like it. I know that you should not feed baby under 12 months, leeks, onion, heavy butter cooking. If you follow the book, your baby may endup with choking hazard. Please watch out. Don't buy this book. The receipt is not good for the baby. They are not suppose to eat those food.
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