Mmmmm!
What, you may find yourself asking, is THAT???
That, my friends, is homemade baby food. I spent $2.19 on a bag of frozen organic baby peas at Whole Foods tonight. I brought them home, heated them up in the microwave for a couple of minutes, added some filtered water, and pureed the hell out of them with my immersion blender. The immersion blender that I've had stashed away in one cupboard or another for TEN YEARS and never used before a few weeks ago! Then I poured them into this silicone tray (that Wilton intended to be used for brownies, but whatever) and now they are in the freezer where they will remain until they are frozen and can be transferred to a Ziploc bag. I was impressed that the bag of peas made exactly enough puree to fill the 24 spaces in the tray. Very nice!
For $2.19 I got 12 servings of organic baby food. If I had bought 12 of those little jars of Earth's Best baby food, I would have spent $9.00 at 70 cents a jar. That's a savings of 76%!
I've been either pureeing stuff as I go, using food from our dinners, or using those little jars of Earth's Best food to feed the baby. My sister in law sent me a great article from the Washington Post about making homemade baby food that talked about how in other parts of the world, it's common for babies to eat "real" food. I don't want to end up being one of those moms who has to cook two seperate meals every night, so I found it really interesting.
Then, yesterday I read on Lindsay's blog about how she and her husband started to make baby food for her twin girls. They were making up a bunch of different purees and then freezing them in individual servings. Most books/people/articles say to use ice cube trays, but she used 24 space silicone baking molds. Genius! We don't own ice cube trays, and I'm trying to limit the buying of plastic items these days, so this was a perfect solution. I'm so glad she posted about it. I went to Michael's while we were out today and used a 40% off coupon to get this brownie bites mold. (They didn't have the ones with the cute shapes that she used)
All I've ended up spending on this for equipment was the $6 for the silicone tray. I already had the stick blender (and would have used the regular blender if I didn't), a saucepan, a steamer insert, and a freezer. Not only am I saving money, we won't have all that packaging from individual baby food jars to deal with either, so we're doing a little more to save the Earth too. Kick butt.
I've got carrots steaming for the next batch as we speak! Bubba approves - check him out in the cool pirate bib his Aunt April sent him:
We've quickly learned here that those cute cloth bibs that were great for milk and drool kinda suck for food.I had been coveting the Beaba BabyCook, but at $150, it was a bit out of my price range. Then, one of the moms in my mom's group said that she bought one and HATED it. She said that when you went to puree stuff the blades would fling the veggies out to the sides of the jar where they couldn't be pureed, so you were constantly having to stop it and scrape down the sides. She said the whole process was such a pain that she stopped making baby food altogether!
So, now all I'm coveting is the book Lindsay posted about. I'll have to see if the library has it. Until then, there's always Weelicious!
Labels: Baby Food
About Sawyer at 11:46 PM
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