Why Your Babies Should Eat Organic Food Today

We are bombarded with information about food products from all directions in today’s times. Newspapers, apps on your phone, articles online and, last but not the least, companies trying to sell their products. How do you decide that the organic khichdi you have carefully made for your baby’s first solid meal is what is best for him or her?
Organic food is made from responsibly grown products and is free of harmful chemicals, pesticides and insecticides. It’s a no-brainer that it is healthy!
Organic Khichdi (khichri) is gaining popularity fast across the globe. This dish made of pulses, rice and vegetables is the perfect nutritive meal for your baby or toddler; even for you too. You can make it in many different ways and keep the consistency of your organic khichdi what you would like it to be. It can even be churned into a puree like consistency for babies to slurp!
If you make sure you only use responsibly grown products in your kitchen you are skipping along the healthy highway.

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Grow Your Own Veggies

You can go the extra mile by growing some of your own vegetables. If you have the luxury of a garden you must dedicate patches of it to growing seasonal vegetables. When you want to make your next batch of khichri you can just step into your garden and pick the veggies you want to add to it. Vertical farming, growing produce in pots that are attached to a wall vertically, is the best way to overcome space constraints that you might face.

Advantages of Organic Khichri and Organic Food

• Nutritionally dense: Organic food, when compared to inorganic sources, has nutritional superiority and can provide a boost to our immune system as well.
• Pesticide-free: Harmful chemicals in pesticides accumulate in our bodies in form of metabolites. In infants and toddlers, these chemicals pose a higher risk and their dire effects get magnified. Organic food uses ingredients that is free of such chemicals that are used for large-scale aggressive farming.
• Some pesticides and insecticides can cause cancer on long-term exposure and they can also cause hormonal imbalance.
• Tastes great and it isn’t addictive: If you introduce organic goodness to your baby right from the beginning she/he will develop a taste for it and will appreciate its pure taste. Junk food, unfortunately makes us believe it is delicious, has addictive ingredients like MSG and processed sugar.

Super-easy khichdi recipes

Remember to use organic veggies, organic pulses and organic rice when you try these recipes out.

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                  Plain Khichdi
Ingredients: Rice, split green gram (mung daal), turmeric, salt (optional), butter/oil or clarified butter (ghee), cumin seeds.

If you are giving your baby salt you can add a salt to taste to this recipe.

• Soak a 2/3rd cup of rice and a 1/3 cup of split green gram lentil in 2 cups of water for 30 minutes.
• Heat a spoon of oil or clarified butter in a pressure cooker
• Add a pinch of cumin seeds and let them crackle
• Add the soaked rice and pulses mixture to the cooker and cook for 3-4 minutes
• Add 1 more cup of water if you want to preparation to be more runny
• Add a pinch of turmeric
• Let the ingredients cook in the pressure cooker for about 30 mins
• Let the steam out of the cooker carefully and then open it
• Let the khichri cool down a bit before you serve it

You can add grated or chopped carrots, potatoes, peas, broccoli, cauliflower and onions to the khichdi recipe above to make it a power-packed meal with all the goodness of vegetables. You can add a single vegetable or a combination of your favorite ones.

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               Yogurt Khichri
Ingredients: Rice (brown or white), Yogurt/Greek yogurt, Curry leaves, salt, butter or clarified butter (ghee), bengal grams/ split red grams/ split green grams/ split black grams.

• Make plain khichdi with your choice of pulses
• Once it has cooled add 1 cup of yogurt to it and mix well
• Heat butter (or ghee) in a frying pan and add curry leaves
• Add the khichdi and yogurt mix to the frying pan and mix well for 2 minutes
• Serve warm

Parents and care-givers are always trying their best to find the most healthy and safe environment for a child to grow. Unfortunately, it is impossible to keep your child protected from all that is harmful in the world, but we can definitely adopt organic food as a way of life to ensure that we minimize their exposure to dangerous chemicals.

So the next time you have your little one on your shoulder, and are burping him after his nutritious organic khichdi meal, let your mind be at rest when makes that tiny sound telling you he is full and satisfied. Burp!

Author’s bio :-

Sonal Khakhar is a founder of Aahanas Naturals She has continued with the heritage of preserving traditional family recipes, and tweaking the inherited recipes further with her knowledge as a Nutritionist.