How this blog got its name

In 1994, when I was a new mother and wanted to feed my baby the best possible way, I first rejected infant formula and then commercial baby food. Both seemed inferior to what I could really provide for my baby. This is how it all happened:

The wonderful people I worked with at the time threw me a baby shower and one of the games we played was tasting commercially prepared baby food and guess what it was. I didn't guess any of them correctly. I was shocked. I couldn't believe that green peas in a baby food jar didn't taste anything like green peas. After that baby shower, I was determined that my baby would eat foods that tasted the way they should.

Up to that point I had never spent much time cooking and had to learn to cook in order to feed my baby healthy and tasty foods. I bought a book to learn what babies and toddlers enjoy eating–as if there was a great mystery to uncover. I have to laugh thinking about that today. Anyhow, our baby always seemed to be interested in eating what my husband and I were eating, so I spent a lot of time during the first year of my baby's life pureeing left-over foods we had had for dinner. Eventually, I cooked up new combinations of foods to please my baby's developing palate and loved when she approved by gobbling it all up. I froze the pureed foods in ice cube trays, so I was ready to pull a meal together for her in an instant.

It was during that first year of my daughter's life that I thought about writing a cookbook focusing on homemade baby food. There was not a lot of information available on the topic, and it seemed so easy to feed her well by pureeing the foods my husband and I prepared for us.

Writing this baby food cookbook never happened, but the idea for it didn't die. As the years went by, my husband and I thought about a working title and "Hey, Baby, what's cooking?" seemed to stick. Thus the title for this blog.

Our first baby is now a teenager and we've evolved and grown as home cooks, still aiming for cooking healthy foods to nourish our bodies properly. It's a quest and a journey that may never end. I've learned many things about health, nutrition and cooking over the last ten+ years and continue to learn new things all the time.

I hope you'll enjoy the blog. Thanks for reading it!