Hi Meg,
You can blend just about anything,including meat and chicken so don't worry about that. I would recommend the Gina Ford Weaning book for recipies and the Annabel Karmel book too, she has a website you can have a look on. We actually started with both fruit and veg after the rice, sweet potatoes, carrots, squash, pear and apple, pear is actually a very good fruit to start with as it's quite easily digested.
Fiona