Vivian Manning-Schaffel: Want only the best for your younginn's tender palate, but are too lazy or strapped for time to take your own gourmet meals to the food processor?

Wait no more. Now you can introduce your baby to solids and cultivate their gourmet palate simultaneously, and the only thing you have to lift is your phone receiver. Companies like Itsy Bitsy Gourmet in the Chicago area and Homemade Baby and Bohemian Baby in L.A. deliver fancy-schmancy dishes like Hawaiian pork and vegetables with coconut korma right to your doorstep.

Sure, the fresh organic food option is way more appealing than jarred food! Who doesn't want to tantalize their kid's taste buds with just-plucked flavors off the vine? And if the very thought of cleaning out your food processor makes you want to take its blades to your wrists, what better way to alleviate your guilt about not wanting to make your own baby food?

Hey, if you've got it, spend it! But, especially now, I can't help but wonder how these companies are faring in this horrific economy. Brands like Happy Baby and Plum Organics offer widely distributed, sophisticated frozen menu options in this realm at a lower price point per serving.

If I could afford to have someone shop for imported Southeast Asian mung beans and freshly plucked pea pods, then hand-deliver the goods and whip up a gourmet meal, they damn well better make me something too. Or at least turn the other way while I feast on the scraps.

Vivian Manning-Schaffel has written for Babble, Parenting, The Advocate, The New York Post, Business Week and a variety of other publications and lives and works in the heart of breeder Brooklyn with her husband and two kids. She authors two pop culture blogs: The Mad Mom and A Hag Supreme, and is on the web at vivianmanningschaffel.com.