Thursday, May 19, 2011

Baby Food

Baby food is insanely expensive! We bought all of the baby food we fed to J when he was eating the stuff. With N, I've decided to take a different approach. I'm trying my hand at making the food.

I had my reservations about doing this, because I thought it'd be hard to do, time consuming and messy. My sister bought a Baby Bullet, and it came with an extra one, so I split the cost with her and now we both have a Baby Bullet set. Way cute and way easy to use.

It came with a recipe book that not only has recipes in it, but it's organized by what foods you should start during what months, etc. I LOVE it! It's made baby food making really easy.

But I have to say that if I'd thought about it, I could have gotten away with doing the same thing in my regular blender. It just wouldn't have the nifty serving/refrigerating cups, the freezer cups and the flat blade...maybe your blenders came with one of those, but mine doesn't have one, so I'm assuming they don't.

What have I noticed about making my own baby food? I know exactly what goes into my baby's mouth. I can make and store a week's worth of food in less than 30 minutes. It costs WAY less than store bought baby food. It tastes better than the nasty stuff you buy. And I think it's just easier.

How do I make it?

Well, with soft things, like avocados, you just blend one up with 1/4 cup of water (more or less if you want it runnier or thicker) and there you have baby avocado food.

With harder things, like sweet potatoes, you boil, microwave or bake them, however you'd like to cook them, then you put them in the blender with about 1/4 cup of water. Very, very easy.

These things keep in the fridge for about 3 days, and in the freezer for about 3 weeks as per the instructions in the Baby Bullet cookbook. An easy way to freeze them is to put the puree into an ice cube tray. Then, when it's frozen, you take them out of the tray and put them into a freezer safe bag, label it and then just toss it back into the freezer. Simple as that. Depending on the size of your cubes, you'll usually have 1-1 1/2 of those as a serving size.

You can even make your own rice, oatmeal, millet cereal.

For cereals, grind 1/2 cup of brown rice, oatmeal or millet into a fine powder. Put it in a pot with 4 cups of water; cover until it boils. Turn down the heat to low and cook with the cover on for 20 minutes. Test the consistency of the cereal. If you want it thinner, add more water. This mixes well with fruit purees and, later on, with chicken or beef dinners.

I've tried both homemade foods and store bought foods with N. He definitely prefers the homemade.

For more recipes, go here.

2 comments:

Logan Family est 2003 said...

I was the same way with my kids. With our oldest we bought the gerber stuff religiously, and do you know what happened? I had to ween him onto our regularly eaten food (I was not about to make 2 different meals). How dumb is that? He hated regular veggies, and meats and dinners made by me. It was SO frustrating. With our other three, we did a little bullet type thing like you and froze them too. I wish I would have known about the ice cube tray thing. It would have worked better, but I just bought the smallest zipplock containers and placed the same groups of food in a ziplock bag and labeled the bag and date. And the best part is that I didn't have to ween my other kids onto our food, and I saved a TON more money. So worth making your own.

Deborah said...

We did something similar with S. We started mashing up whatever we ate for two reasons. One, he got used to my cooking, and it's done wonders in keeping him from being a picky eater. Two, I didn't have the time or energy to make one meal most nights, let alone two. :)