The Instant Pot Baby and Toddler Food Cookbook

My latest cookbook, The Instant Pot Baby and Toddler Food Cookbook: Wholesome Recipes That Cook Up Fast in Any Brand of Electric Pressure Cooker, is now available. I’ll teach you how your pressure cooker is your secret weapon in making healthy food your littlest ones will love!

The Instant Pot Baby Food and Toddler Food Cookbook has over 100 easy and delicious recipes that will make you feel good about how you are feeding your kids—and will get you out of the kitchen faster!

These recipes will introduce your child to a wide variety of healthy and delicious meals, taking them from first foods to eating with the family.

• NO cooking separate meals for you and your kid!
• Low-sugar breakfasts your kid will want to eat
• Lunches that minimize your cooking
• Dinners you can customize for your toddler
• Trustworthy recipes that work in any brand of pressure cooker
• Tons of tips for getting your kid to eat, plus storage and safety information

This combined version is printed in full color and features several color photos of the recipes.

The cookbook is NOW ON SALE wherever books are sold—at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or order it from your favorite independent bookstore.

When my publisher approached me about doing a baby and toddler food cookbook, my mind went right to my daughter, Jennifer. She was expecting, and her new little one would be ready for solid foods right around the time these cookbooks would hit the market.

It seemed like it was meant to be!

Since it had been years since I’d cooked for my own babies, I asked Jennifer to join me in writing this book.

Jennifer is an accomplished cook in her own right. She uses the pressure cooker as much as I do—or more often, if that’s possible! And she has plenty of experience making baby food and customizing toddler meals for her two boys. 

She’s also a big-time reader, especially when it comes to her kids, so I knew that she’d be up-to-date on the latest recommendations for feeding babies and toddlers.

Philosophy behind the Instant Pot Baby Food and Toddler Food Cookbook

Whenever possible, we try to cook meals from scratch. Not only is the food better tasting, but we know exactly what ingredients we’re eating and can control the levels of salt, sugar, and fat in our foods.

When feeding babies and toddlers, it’s especially important to ensure they’re eating foods that will give them the nutrition they need. The food habits you want for your children in elementary school and beyond won’t magically develop when they hit a certain age—these habits are built from the very beginning.

Consider how long some classic ingredients in baby foods, such as potatoes, apples, and squash, take to cook on a stove top or in an oven. Now reduce that time to a fraction of what it was and you can see why pressure cooking is the ideal method for making baby and toddler foods!

In addition to the delicious recipes, we’ve included lots of tips and information gathered from a variety of reliable sources that will help you feel confident feeding your baby or toddler. (After all these years feeding kids, we have a few tricks up our sleeves, supported by recent guidelines from pediatricians and parenting experts.)

Ultimately, we believe that there are many wonderful approaches to pressure cooking and many great approaches to feeding your family. The “right” form of cooking is the one that works with the time you have and the way you want to feed your family!

Part 1: Baby Food

In this cookbook, we’ve done our best to help make feeding your baby easier and faster. The pressure cooker is a fantastic tool you can use to create healthy, nutritious meals for your baby!

The cookbook begins by discussing baby feeding practices and introduces readers to the basics of preparing baby foods in the pressure cooker as well as providing safe storage and serving guidelines.

We’ve included a wide variety of recipes that will take you through baby’s first foods to baby’s first birthday celebration. The recipes introduce babies to simple fruits and vegetable purees, then expands to combination fruits/veggies, grains, and meats/dinners with more complex flavors and textures. 

Whether you plan to cook just a few foods, batch cook a week’s worth of meals, or make every bit of your baby’s food from scratch, this book will guide you through the process!

Part 2: Toddler Food

In this cookbook, we’ve taken our family’s favorite recipes and toned down the seasonings and sugar content to introduce your toddler to grown-up food without overwhelming their sensitive palates. 

Think of these recipes as training wheels for family eating!

These recipes will introduce young eaters to a variety of foods and allow parents to customize the seasonings and ingredients to accommodate toddlers’ changing preferences. We have also included several points where you can remove a portion of the meal specifically for your toddler before finishing the recipe, allowing you to eat like a grown-up and still accommodate your toddler.

One of the concepts we are excited about are our lunchtime recipes. These “three-way recipes” are designed to minimize your cooking—cook the protein one day and use it to create three easy meals. No eating the same leftovers multiple times a week (unless you want to)! 

The recipes are designed to make a single meal for a smaller family of three or four, since larger families will likely have grown beyond making meals tailored to their toddlers’ tastes. Because of this smaller portion size, the recipes in this book make many of the mains and sides at the same time. (As a note: When it’s just my husband and me, we’ll use these recipes with double the spices. The toddler book doubles as an awesome cooking-for-two cookbook!)

Adding Jennifer to the Pressure Cooking Today Team

Writing these books with Jennifer was so much fun that I’ve invited her to become a regular presence on Pressure Cooking Today. 

Jenn has been my behind-the-scenes operator helping me broadcast my Facebook Live videos. She’s been helping me stay on track with my websites. With the cookbooks, she’s tested pretty much every recipe in every cookbook and has helped me fine-tune the text.

With her two little boys, Jennifer and her husband have become experts at using the electric pressure cooker to make busy weeknight meals and big-batch breakfasts. 

I thought I’d let her introduce herself here:

A note from Jennifer

Hi everyone! I’m thrilled to be here!

When Mom first got into pressure cooking, I’ll admit I was totally intimidated. The weird noises and huge jet of steam were unlike any method of cooking I’d encountered. Since my husband and I were both working at the time, we stuck to our crockpot, despite Mom’s frequent encouragement.

All that changed after my son was born and my little family moved in with Mom and Dad while we built a new home. Mom shared her kitchen with me, and I saw first-hand how quick and easy it is to make meals in a pressure cooker. I was hooked!

Mom gave us an Instant Pot for Christmas that year, and we’ve never looked back. At this point, we have one for the main dish and one for sides. I can’t really remember how we made meals without it!

We’ve become the Q&A on-call for our friends and family, and we’ve even been able to teach classes to church groups and friends about how easy it is to cook great meals in the pressure cooker. 

I look back at my history as a cook—my mom once bought me a timer to wear because I kept burning cookies that I’d start baking and forget about them while they were in an oven. I can’t help but be grateful for mom’s patience and guidance. If I can become a good cook, anyone can!

I’m so excited to start sharing some of my family’s favorite recipes with you!

–Jennifer

Read more about my cookbooks:

• The Electric Pressure Cooker Cookbook
• Instantly Sweet
• Dream Puffs
• The Instant Pot Baby Food Cookbook (black and white edition with just baby food recipes.)
• The Instant Pot Toddler Food Cookbook (black and white edition with just toddler food recipes.)
• Instant Pot Baby Food and Toddler Food Cookbook – with color photographs