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Fast, easy & delicious baby and toddler recipes for you and your small roommate who doesn't pay rent. 

MATCHING 

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meals

The Collection
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Are You...

  • Struggling with ideas of what to cook your small, non-rent paying roommate?

  • Unsure how to adapt your favourite meals to suit the little person you somehow have to feed three times a day?

  • Bored of sweet potato and looking for ways to introduce interesting flavours to your baby?

  • Sick of organising separate meals for everyone in your house?

  • In desperate need of coffee?

 

MATCHING meals is for you.

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win!

Purchase Matching Meals Volume 4 before September 1 for your chance to win a $150 grocery voucher - to help fund your family-style dinners. Or, you know, like, three punnets of strawberries.

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Our Story

Introducing a baby to solid food can be as overwhelming as navigating a fast-paced Aldi checkout.  ​ As a food blogger, former caterer and someone who studied cooking, I felt excited about starting my daughter Poppy on solids at six months.  ​ A devotee of Solid Starts, my plan was to start slow, offering one meal per day, feeding her things I like to eat, fostering self-feeding and avoiding having to make dull purées. All with the goal of preventing picky eating and instilling a love of food. Easy.    That was until I received a stern word from our GP who told me my approach was "wrong." By six months she "should be on three meals per day" - with "beef and chicken purée" in particular. Poppy was growing well, but had been waking up overnight to feed. According to the doctor, she was hungry and more solids would fix that.  ​ After the appointment, I followed the doctor's orders and made Poppy beef purée, which she hardly touched. I found myself hovering over her, anxiously willing her to eat more and picking up the spoon to force it into her mouth. When I went to bed that night, I didn't feel good at all. This wasn't the positive experience I wanted it to be. So the next day I decided I needed to stick with what felt right for us.   ​ This was the beginning of "Matching Meals". Download Volume 1 to read our full solids journey and find out why the doc's advice was outdated. ​ We've got many years to go before we know if we have successfully prevented picky eating and instilled a love of food in Poppy, but we're having a great time along the way. I hope you enjoy these meals as much as we have. ​ xx Chloe and Poppy

Our story

About Me...

My name is Chloe and I live in Sydney, Australia. If you’re in the Bondi area, you may have seen me scoffing a croissant while pushing a pram in sweaty maternity leggings, which I am convinced I will still be wearing at my daughter’s wedding. My love of food began with my beautiful mum, Jenny. Mum was the queen of entertaining and would make everything from scratch. Growing up, my sister Christie and I were exposed to a world of exciting flavours. Mum cooked countless cuisines and rarely repeated a dish. We’d have Thai beef lettuce wraps one night, Greek yemista the next, Indian samosas after that. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realised how fortunate I was to grow up with food being such a positive and unproblematic source of pure joy. On the other end of the food spectrum is my darling dad, one of the pickiest eaters of all time. Until he met my mum at age 20, he pretty much only ate Vegemite toast! As a youngster, he refused to eat any family meals and eventually removed himself from the dinner table altogether. Well, being a food-loving Greek, mum wasn’t about to tolerate that. She gave him an ultimatum, and that brought (most of) his pickiness to an end. The combination of my two wonderful but wildly different parents food-wise is a huge part of what led me to my fascination with baby-led weaning (BLW). The idea of exposing a baby to a world of new flavours and (hopefully) preventing picky eating in the process is incredibly exciting. In 2010, we tragically lost our amazing mum to cancer at just 55. Following this devastating loss, I did everything I could related to food. I suppose it was my way of trying to feel close to mum. After finishing my university degree, I went to cooking school, worked at food magazines, did recipe testing (the best job ever), catering and assisted a professional food stylist. I also started a blog called Grain of Salt, posting content with the kind of irregularity that guarantees mere handfuls of followers, most of which were my 50 Greek cousins. In 2021, I became a mum myself when my handsome partner (and personal barista) Jake and I welcomed our daughter Poppy. When I was pregnant, I saw my cousin Rachael’s baby girl Charli feeding herself real food and it totally blew my mind. No baby food, no pouches, no spoon-feeding, she was eating the same stuff we were! Rachael showed me Solid Starts and I quickly became obsessed with BLW. When it came time for Poppy to start solids, I knew what I wanted to do. I shared our experience on Instagram and was quite shocked by the response. I started to receive messages from parents all over Australia. It wasn’t just my Greek cousins anymore! In March 2022, Grain of Salt became Matching Meals. While I am devastated that Poppy won’t get to meet her incredible Yia Yia, I am committed to making sure her childhood memories of food are as magical as mine. If I do half as good a job as my mum did, I’ll be happy. Thank you for being here and sharing in this experience with us.

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