Okay. So, the dish I’m going to show you is called Squash and Red-Lentil. It’s perfect for babies, once they pass the very first stage. So, once you’ve introduced a variety of single variety purees, you’re ready to move on to little bit more texture. And lentils are a great way to bring in a little bit more grainy texture in, which you can then gradually increase as your baby gets more comfortable with it. Let’s grab our butternut squash. Any kind of squash or pumpkin is perfect for this recipe, and like one of the big red round curvies as well as the butternut squash. And what you do as you would with any other recipe cut in half, scoop out the seeds, peel it and then grate it. So you scoop out the seeds, take off the peel and then grate it either with just a normal grater or put it through your food processor. So the ingredients you got here is grated squash, this one is actually butternut squash and there is 300 grams of squash here and then a 100 grams of red lentils.
We do lentils -- you should actually rinse them before you use them. So, just use a fine grade metal sieve, just rinse them under cold water. And you also just need to give them more than once because occasionally because these lentils themselves are so hard, you just need to see if there is any tiny little stones in them. I find that lentils are much better cooked in a pan rather than steamed, it take quite a long time to get them soft enough when you steam them. Put them in a saucepan and cover them with boiling water, just enough to cover. Then just bring them to the heat. Because lentils take a little bit longer to cook than the squash, just give them about another two or three minutes so they just start to go slightly transparent and slightly soft for adding the butternut squashing. So, these have been cooking for three minutes, the edges are starting to get clear, so I’m now going to add in the squash. Now this is still for your young baby that’s less than a year, so there’s no added salt in this recipe at all. There’s enough natural salt in the lentils and in the squash for the baby. And babies really shouldn’t have any additional salt added to food before they are 12 months. And that’s because their kidney is just not developed enough to cope with the additional salt.
We just depend on the season whether the squash is quite dry or quite juicy, so you will have to use your eye to work out whether you need to add a little bit more liquid on this one, it certainly does. So what you want to do is, then just enough water to cover it, leave it on a very gentle simmer for ten minutes until everything including the lentils as well as the largest piece of squash is soft enough to squeeze between your finger and your thumb. Okay, so it’s now been cooking and I’m tested it, and the lentils are nice and soft, the reason you want to be able to swallow it in two swallows is that, when you -- at this stage your baby is learning to deal with texture. So, with the smooth purees, the single variety purees, the baby can swallow the purees in just one go. For an confident baby, you can serve this as it is, you may also want to give it a little bit of ablates and that’s a great thing about home made baby food as you can make it smooth or as textures as you like. So, rather than using a little herb chopping attachment, we’re going to use the standard normal blender that comes with a hand blender. And you just give it a couple of quick pulses, if you want, you can keep it going to this really smooth, you just want to keep enough texture in there.
That’s really all you needs. I’m just going to pop it into one of these little serving bowls; you can see what it looks like. This really has a lovely warm wintery smell. Of course, if you are making this up, you may not want to use just a tiny little bit f squash, you might want to make the whole squash up. It really makes it a really lovely hot warming soup for the whole family. And that’s butternut squash with red lentils.
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