Mindy Kaling Loves Making Homemade Baby Food
Mindy Kaling’s Instagram account is an absolute treasure. Where else can you go to ogle a custom-made Naeem Khan gown and an ombré chocolate cake at the same time? Kaling is brilliantly funny, and she loves food as much as she loves fashion. And this weekend she revealed that she really enjoys making baby food and doing meal prep for her 6-month-old baby.
“One of the best parts about being a mom: Doing a meal prep for my daughter today,” she wrote on her Instagram story along with some vegetable emojis and a heart-shaped sticker that says “Baby Mama.”
According to Today, Kaling posted her whole-weekend baby-food meal prep process. She boiled sweet potato cubes, then made “fresh 2 death” string beans and poached salmon, both of which came from the farmers’ market. She said her father brought her some mangoes from an Indian store, so she chopped and packed those, too. It’s all fresh and gorgeous and made with love.
Kaling made a lot of different kinds of baby food, but she says she finds the whole process very rewarding, and that it’s one of the best parts of her weekend.
After all the food was cooked, she packed it up and labeled each container with the date. If you are ever making baby food, do not forget the date label! You might think you will remember when you made it, but that’s how a person winds up standing in front of the refrigerator, holding a bowl of poached salmon and thinking, “When did I make this? Two days ago? Two months ago? What even is time anymore?”
I loved making homemade baby food too. When nothing has more than one ingredient you never have to set timers or measure anything. It’s just so easy. Everything I cooked felt like a victory. I’d put a chopped vegetable in a pot of boiling water or a steamer basket, then come back once it was soft to bask in the glow of accomplishment: “Look at me, I boiled that sweet potato like a boss!”
Homemade baby food is very easy to store for later, too. I liked to freeze mine in ice cube trays, so I could make a big batch all at once, then just thaw a few cubes whenever it was meal time.
Kaling said she knows there’s a lot of good prepared organic baby foods on the market, but she really enjoys making her own.
“One of the most rewarding parts of my weekend is doing meal prep of my daughter because she’s now eating foods,” Kaling said. “I never did this for myself before I had a kid.”