6 Amazon Cutting Tools that Will Make Baby-Led Weaning Easier & Faster for You

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Are, you about to start Solid Foods, but You don't know where to start. Or. maybe you started with some purees and now you want to make a switch. The best place To get started. learning about starting solid foods safely is my one hour online video workshop called Baby LED WEANING FOR BEGINNERS I just rerecorded this free training and it's packed with videos and visuals on how to safely prep baby led weaning foods, what it looks like for the first few days, how to reduce Choking risk and what to do if your baby has an allergic reaction to food. Everybody on this free training gets a copy of my original 100 First Foods list so you'll never run out of ideas about what to feed your baby. Next, you can get signed up for this video workshop at baby led weaning dot co If.

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you have one hour to dedicate to learning about baby led weaning. Come take this free online video training and grab your copy of that original a hundred FIRST FOODS list. While you're there, again, head to baby led weaning dot co to get signed up and I hope to see you there. Your highchair is definitely the most important piece of equipment that you will buy as your baby makes the transition to Solid Foods. And if you play your cards right, you can pick a highchair that's not only a safe seat for your baby to eat, but one that will also grow with your child through to adolescence. So there's no buy in a highchair for starting solid foods and then having to buy a toddler chair and buying a preschool chair and then getting a different new chair for your school aged kids when they have to do homework.

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The STO Nome highchair is one of my absolute favorite highchair for baby led weaning. The Nome was created by the legendary Scandinavian designer Peter Sik as a modern chair for babies so they can join their family at mealtimes from their first bite. The no meat features an adjustable footrest that does not require tools to change, and that's important because your baby's feet need to be resting flat on a solid foot plate in order to support a safe swallow. Now, most high chairs don't have an adjustable foot rest, and if they even do have a footrest and it changes heights, you've gotta go get the toolbox out to move it every time your baby grows an inch. The NOMI also has an optional tray that you can add on if you have a counter or a bar height table because regular high chairs don't reach that high.

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But you also might consider using the tray if you like to eat outside or you move your baby around at mealtimes to different rooms, or you'd like to keep the baby by you in the kitchen. Right now you can get the Know Me highchair tray for free. So that's a $70 value when you purchase the Stoa No Me Highchair using the affiliate discount code Baby led at checkout. So that's a free $70 Nome highchair tray using the code Baby lead LED when you purchase the Nome highchair@stoker.com. That's S-T-O-K-K e.com. And the beautiful thing about this tool is that it not only works to make the apple slices the exact size that you need for baby led weaning, but it works for other fruits like pears if you're going to poach them.

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And so by poaching the fruit, that's the way that we can take a totally unsafe food like a raw crunchy or crispy apple or paras strip. And when you slice it properly, you peel it, you core it and you poach it, you're making it soft so that it passes the squish test and is thereby safe enough for your baby to self feed. Hey there, I'm Katie Ferraro, registered dietician, college nutrition professor and mom of seven specializing in baby led weaning here on the baby led weaning with Katie Ferraro podcast. I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, giving you the confidence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to Solid Foods using baby led weaning.

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The other day I caught myself complaining, well, I was more like lamenting the fact that we don't have any ice at our house. I'm not a big water drinker, but I do a great ice, makes it taste better. So we have double fridge in our kitchen and then my garage, I have a backup fridge with a pullout freezer and a deep freezer, but there's no ice in any of those. So, and I keep saying like someday in the not too distant future, my husband and I swear we're gonna do a kitchen remodel, but we never get around to it. Like so someday like normal people will have ice in our house. And I know I could get a countertop ice maker, but I'm sorry, I hate countertop appliances. I already have enough CRAP in my house. I've got seven kids that come home from school, they just drop their stuff everywhere.

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Like I just am working really hard on not having clutter on my kitchen counters, which I totally get is a personal thing. More power to you if you like countertop appliances. But I always snicker when I see people online or social media complaining about single use kitchen tools and they say, oh, how silly they are, because my counters might be clean. But if you look in my drawers in my kitchen, holy moly, I've realized I'm the queen of single use kitchen tools. But here's the thing, I use some of those quote unquote single use tools almost every day. So I make food for babies for my job, and I make lots of food for my kids and my family.

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I do that for free. But I wanna share six cutting tools from Amazon. I have in my drawers that I use nearly every day. That will definitely make baby Led, Weaning, Easier and Faster for You, no matter how much baby or adult food you are making. So I like to start out each of these mini training episodes with a baby led weaning tip of the day. And today's tip is all about the shape and the size of the foods for baby lead waning. So any finger food that you can make that's shaped approximately about the size of your adult pinky finger will be easy for your early eater to pick up. Okay? And that's because babies, when they're just starting out on Solid Foods, they don't have their pinster grasp yet.

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So that's not gonna come until they're nine or 10 months of age. So earlier on at six and seven, eight months, when you start Solid Foods, your baby's gonna use their whole hand or their Palmer grasp and they're gonna rake and scoop food up. So if you can get those foods into the shape of that adult pinky finger, it is going to make self-feeding so much easier on your baby, which in turn is gonna make your life easier since you're doing all this work to raise an independent eater and hang tight because in this episode I'm going to share the six tools that honestly do not take up that much space that are ideal for cutting finger foods for your baby. And I'll go through them quickly. But if you don't have time to listen to the whole episode, I will link all of the six Amazon cutting tools that I'm covering in this episode.

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It'll be in the description, so you can check them out right below where you're listening or on the show notes@blwpodcast.com slash 4 7 5. All right, let's get started with the six Amazon Cutting Tools, that Will, Make, Baby Led, Weaning Easier, and Faster for You. I'm starting with my all time favorite and most affordable cutting tool. It is the crinkle cutter. All right, so the crinkle cutter, you don't need to buy any particular brand. I've bought some fancier ones, a fancy crinkle cutter, just FYI does not do anything fancier than a regular crinkle cutter. Get the $5 Amazon crinkle cutter. And here's how I use this one. I learned this trick from my friend Dawn Winkleman. She's a speech language pathologist. We were making a bunch of baby foods back in the day and she's like, I'm talking about tofu.

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And tofu is my favorite way to introduce babies to soy. And I just, I'm basic. I used to just cut the tofu into pieces about the size of my adult pinky fingers. She's like, why don't you use a crinkle cutter for that? The crinkle cutter gives the kind of little jagged edge, which is a little bit more traction. It makes it slightly easier for the baby to pick up. It also looks super cute. So whenever you see tofu in any of my content in my program or online, it's always cut with a crinkle cutter. And there's a couple other foods that I cut with a crinkle cutter. I love to do avocado strips. I, if I do canned fruits like canned peaches or pears, I cut them with a crinkle cutter just because when they're really slippery, it's sometimes a little challenging for your baby to pick up. And the crinkle cutter just makes it slightly easier for them to pick it up. But it's also a super easy way for you to cut it.

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Or if you have toddlers that are helping you make foods for your baby, obviously the more we can involve children in the kitchen, the more likely they are to participate in actually eating that food. But I also know that cutting with toddlers is a real pain in the neck and can be dangerous. But with the crinkle cutter, they can cut the soft foods and participate as well. So check out the crinkle cutter five bucks on Amazon. Second product, I used to scoff at people that had this, the grape cutter, and I'm talking in particular the Oxo. So the brand OXO. This is not sponsored by Oxo. I have no financial relationship with them. I just love their kitchen tools and the grape cutter. I used to be like, who cannot cut a grape? So here's the deal with cutting grapes. First of all, we don't do grapes for earlier eaters, so you gotta do quartered grapes for babies before they're one and we cut the grapes in half, even after age one.

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But of course, your earlier eater who doesn't have their pen or grasp, they can't cut up the quartered grapes. So this is not for like your phase one baby led weaning eaters. And I call the phase one. That's the first eight weeks of starting solid foods in our program is phase one. We do not do grapes for those babies. I have recipes though that will show you how to make grapes safe for your baby. But we don't do the small pieces for those earlier eaters. But when, when you get to the point where you're going to be cutting grapes in quarters for your baby or in half when they're over age one, the grape cutter is awesome because you can cut a bunch of grapes at once. It's basically like a spring loaded device that you use your thumb to press down. And there's a little chamber, it has a blade that comes down that cuts the grape into quarters, and you can just bang these grapes out pretty fast, which at this point I can quarter grapes with a grape cutter way faster than I could cut them with a serrated knife.

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So I love the grape cutter. The one from Oxo is $12. There's another older version of a grape cutter that you only intermittently can find online and it cuts the grapes in half. I like that Oxo grape cutter. It's kind of like this tall sleeve and you shove the grapes in between these two plastic sleeves and then you run your serrated knife down the middle. I like that because you can cut a lot more grapes at once, but you can only cut them in half and you could, for the having the grapes, you could literally achieve the same effect if you just do, I do two paper plates or a regular plate, and then I do like a paper plate on the top, and then I hold down the paper plate on the top and use my serrated knife to cut through the middle so the grapes are in the middle and cut them all in half. But if you want the grape quarter for 12 bucks, I think it's pretty awesome. Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back.

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One thing that I really struggle with is drinking enough water. I know drinking water is important to staying hydrated and healthy, but I was surprised to learn that extensive research by the environmental working group found that three out of four homes in America have harmful contaminants in its water. So I wanna build healthier habits for myself, but I also wanna stay hydrated with pure healthy water. And that's why I recommend checking out AquaTru. AquaTru purifiers use a four stage reverse osmosis purification process and it removes 15 times more contaminants than ordinary pitcher filters. So AquaTru has water purifiers to fit every type of home. They've got installation free countertop purifiers to higher capacity under sync options.

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They even have a wifi connected purifier plus mineral boost options. The AquaTru filters are affordable and long lasting. There's no change in the filters every two to three months. AquaTru filters last from six months up to two years, and just one set of filters from their classic purifier, it makes the equivalent of 4,500 bottles of water. So it works out to less than 3 cents a bottle. Not to mention the environmental impact that you have by not wasting tons of extra plastic. Best of all, I think B AquaTru water tastes fantastic and You don't have to worry about any harmful contaminants in your water. We collectively drink a ton of water in our house. I can actually taste the difference compared with my old filter. And I don't know if this is over the top, but we recently got a dog and I give the AquaTru water to my dog now too.

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AquaTru comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. It makes a great gift. Since you're a listener of this show, you can get 20% off any AquaTru purifier if you head to the website aquatru.com, that's A-Q-U-A-T-R u.com and enter the code weaning at checkout. That's 20% off any AquaTru water purifier when you go to aquatru.com and use promo code weaning W-E-A-N-I-N-G at checkout. My third favorite Amazon cutting tool, hard boiled egg slicer. I love hard boiled eggs for babies because they are a really unique texture if you think about it, right?

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Where else can you get a rubbery texture? That's the egg white, that's nice and soft and safe for your baby to eat, but also the mealy texture of a hard boiled egg yolk in the same food. Okay, it's the hard boiled egg. I love doing hard boiled eggs in the instant pot. This is one of my favorite tricks. 5, 5, 5. You put the hard boiled eggs on high pressure for five minutes. I do the steam release for five minutes and then I cool them in an ice bath for five minutes. Except I already told you don don't have ice. So I just use really cold water. But without really paying attention to it, you can basically get perfect hard boiled eggs. But then when you peel the egg, which by the way, peeling the hard boiled eggs under running water is much more effective and a much cleaner way to get the eggshells off without leaving any pieces.

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But then when you do it, you're like, okay, well how's this baby going to eat it? 'cause it's hard to cut hard boiled eggs into pinky sized pieces. But if you use the hard boiled egg slicer, this one's $6 on Amazon. It's so fast to cut it into pieces that your baby can pick it up and feed it to themselves without making like an absolute mess trying to cut it. The fourth Amazon cutting tool that I absolutely love is an apple slicer. Now, I know you can cut an apple by yourself, but here's the deal with apples. Sometimes parents will be like, wait, Katie, why do you have apples on your hundred First Foods list? I thought apples were a choking hazard. Well, lots of foods, if they're prepared incorrectly, can be a choking hazard. And apples are certainly a huge choking risk if they are served to babies and children improperly.

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And for babies, any hard, crunchy or crispy foods, including raw apples, super high choking risk. But you can modify apples and make them safe for your baby to eat. And the way we do that is we slice the apples, we core the apples, we peel the apples, and then we poach the apple. So poaching is cooking in a small amount of liquid and it softens the apples until they get fork tender. They pass the squished test, which means if you put that poached apple strip between your forefinger and your thumb, there should be some give. And then we season 'em with nutmeg or cinnamon or whatever you want. I, I do this for pears as well, actually poach a lot of fruits in my program. But pears and apples, you can use the apple slicer to cut that into the pieces. And I'm sorry, but if I'm like cutting and slicing one apple, I'm gonna be doing a lot of them at once.

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So I like to batch cook and I'll do like a dozen apples at one time. And in that case, having the apple slicer is super effective. Now you can get an eight, a 12, or a 16 slice apple slicer. It doesn't really matter. Obviously the size of your apple depends how big the eventual slices are gonna be. But for like a medium sized apple, I generally use the 12 slice slicer apple slicer online. You can get it for less than 10 bucks. I don't like the plastic ones 'cause they break super easy. I pay a dollar or two more for the stainless steel ones and they're really effective at cutting the apples. Have you even taught my kids to cut the apples now with minimal tragedy in the kitchen? So I think this is a good device to have on hand if you're, you know, not only making a lot of apples for your babies, but then as they get older, having your kids actually cut the apples.

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'cause you know how annoying it is to find an apple with one or two bites taken out of it that a kid started and then left somewhere else around your house. I find they do a much better job if I slice them, but I like to have their help slicing 'em as well. So check out the apple slicer. The next device cutting tool that I love is a pizza cutter. I've had a variety of these. I like the Oxo one 16 bucks. I use pizza cutters all the time for cutting stuff into pieces about the size of your adult pinky finger. So for a lot of the recipes in my baby led weaning program, we have a hundred First, Foods, Daily, Meal Plan. We have a content library with a hundred different foods and recipes for different ages and phases and stages of baby led weaning. So always recipe testing. I make a lot of our baked goods, no added sugar, no salt, but all those recipes they bake off in mini loaf pants as opposed to muffin tins because they come out rectangular.

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And then you just use that pizza cutter, just roll it right through. I cut a lot of individual sticks, put 'em in food storage containers, can freeze 'em for later, refrigerate 'em for sooner use. But I use the pizza cutter, especially for pancakes. We do a lot of whole grain flour pancakes. I also use it for the cutting things like egg strips or some of the different fritters that we make. So we have a quinoa fri recipe, Brussels sprout fri a recipe when you fry or you bake these things off and they're set and they cool. Sometimes when you cut 'em it all falls apart. But I found that with a pizza cutter, it's really the most efficient, quickest way to get those nice finger foods strips. And I do a bunch of 'em at once to make again those extra foods that I can have set aside for when babies come over and are ready to eat. I don't need to be spending a bunch of time prepping food if I've already pre-cut everything.

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Alright, the sixth and final Amazon cutting tool that will make your life easier. This is another one I used to laugh at. Well, I didn't know about this one, I'll be honest. I used to laugh at the grape cutter. I thought that was dumb. Who can't cut grapes? Then I used it a lot. I'm like, this is actually awesome. Pineapple cutter. Did not know what a pineapple cutter was. I know you probably like, why don't you just buy already cut pineapple because it's really expensive. It's not always super soft or ripe. And then a lot of times pineapples cut into tidbits which are too small for earlier eaters to pick up and feed themselves. So I love canned pineapple. If you do canned pineapple in its own juice or in water, then you can get pineapple rings and when you cut 'em in half, your baby can kind of pick up that little half moon and feed it to themselves. That's great. But if you wanna do fresh pineapple personally, I feel it's always more affordable, at least where I live in southern California, to buy the whole pineapple and cut it yourself.

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But I know it's kind of a pain to cut a pineapple. So our first au pair that lived with us, she's such a doll, Julia, and it's when my youngest twins, Gus and Hannah were starting solid foods and she was watching me cut a pineapple and I'm not really great with knives to begin with. And she was just like, oh my gosh, you're terrible at cutting a pineapple. And so on her very limited au pair salary, she went on Amazon and bought me a pineapple cutter. And she's like, we use this in Germany all the time, which I did not know. They eat a lot of pineapple in Germany. And she showed me how to use a pineapple cut cutter. It's genius. You lop off each end of the pineapple, you shove this like conical knife thing through the middle of the pineapple, you twist it, you extract the core, and then you're left with these perfect concentric circle rings of pineapple, which you literally just cut in half and put 'em out in the bowl for the baby to eat.

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And then what I love is that you can take the core of the pineapple and you can actually throw that in your blender and make a smoothie with it. So you're using like more of the pineapple than you would if you were just, especially if you were me to hack it up on your own. So the pineapple cutter, the good one that I get on Amazon, this is a little pricey. It's $23 and I would say that about every two years I probably have to replace it 'cause it's just like the blades wear out and it's not as effective. And I'm like, I feel like this isn't cutting the pineapple so great. But I love the pineapple cutter. So there you have it. Six Amazon cutting tools, crinkle cutter, five bucks, grape cutter from Oxo, 12 bucks, hard boiled egg slicer, six bucks, apple slicer around 10 bucks, pizza cutter, 16 bucks, pineapple cutter, 23 bucks. Check out some of these tools if you're interested in cutting foods a lot more quickly and easily for your baby, for baby lead weenie.

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And here's a quick win for you. If you have not yet tried these foods, tofu for your baby grapes, hard boiled eggs, apples, peas, whole grain pancakes, or a pineapple. Just get one of these tools and try it out as a way to cut these foods easily for your baby. And if you'd like instructions on how to make all of these foods plus more for your baby's age and their current stage My program, BABY led weaning with Katie Ferraro is a step-by-step blueprint to help your baby safely eat more than a hundred foods before they turn one. The program has my original hundred First, Foods, Daily, Meal Plan. So you don't even have to think about what five foods you're gonna feed your baby this week. Plus there's a content library in there that's packed with videos, instructions, and recipes on how to make all of the foods on the hundred First Foods list for your baby's current age and stage.

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You can get signed up and start your baby's next five new foods this week when you register at baby led weaning dot co slash program. That's baby led weaning dot co slash program. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to our partners at AirWave Media. If you like podcasts that feature food and science and using your brain, check out some of the podcasts from AirWave or online@blwpodcast.com. I'll put all of the show notes for this episode@blwpodcast.com slash 4 7 5 and I'll see you next time.

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