The Best Books for Healthy (Vegetarian) Babies

By focusing on plant-based and vegetarian foods, Ruth Yaron gives new parents step-by-step instructions on how to prepare homemade, organic baby food, with tips on ensuring that your baby gets all the nutrients she needs. The best part is that you can make foods ahead of time and freeze them to eat later. Bye bye, Gerber. Hello, fresh purees!

Tis accessible book provides nutritional and social advice, plus fantastic vegan recipes. (My family loves the muscle muffins.) Plus, the practical tips are a must. The authors advise, for example, that you always make sure that tofu is cooked or steamed before eating it — otherwise, you could end up with "tofu tummy."

The renowned pediatrician Dr. Spock came to recommend vegetarian diets for children at the end of his career. This book will help you discover what kind of vegetarian your baby is, and how to ensure that he (or she) gets all the nutrients needed at each stage of his development.

The doctors who penned this straightforward book draw on nutritional research, such as a long-term research study in rural China (known as, wait for it, the "China Study"), to make the case that children should be eating exclusively vegan foods. Their advice extends from healthy eating during pregnancy to adolescence.

Before this was a book, it was a blog. I'd find myself visiting right before lunch and wondering why I'd packed leftovers when I could have prepared amaranth timbales, slow cooker black beans, steamed swiss chard, and a tangerine. From the simple to the fancy, this cookbook provides great menu ideas and recipes that the whole family will enjoy.

Think that vegetable-laden meals will have your kids running for the hills? Not so with these kid-friendly recipes, which have been tested by real families. Our family favorite? The lemon-garlic asparagus.