Fruits and Veggies - Make your own Baby food (UPDATED)

If I can do this, I know you can too!!!

So I have seemed to find myself making home made baby food for my second sweet baby girl. Really this is very easy, just a few extra pieces of produce and an extra hour every couple of weeks. Especially easy when the little ones are just learning. Plus it is fun to let them try all kinds of foods that Gerber doesn’t make into the jars at the grocery store. Adeline started on cereal from a box (I find it too painful to plan to give her an iron supplement and grind then cook my own cereal that only lasts a few days – though try it for yourself to see if it will work for you) and Esther started with Sweet Potatoes. Both loved it! They loved starting foods at 6 months of age.

I started by buying a cute red Cuisine Art Mini Prep Blender. I knew I wouldn’t be making enough of this stuff to serve an army, so it has worked extremely well and doesn’t take up a ton of room. You put in a sweet potato and it fits perfectly or a couple of bananas. With Adeline my oldest I used the cube method. Very grab and go. A little extra detail in getting the food into the cubes, but it worked very well. With Esther I started with the ice cube trays that had a lid. I find this very easy in you throw the food in and try to keep them in the cubes. Let it freeze then pop them in to zip lock bags. This method uses way less freezer space and I don’t have to worry about trays of cubes. The down side is that it lacks the grab and go. You have to have a spare bowl at the moment you are grabbing and going. Not the end of the world, but a little less flexible. Also, I usually start off by cooking many foods at once to minimize the time in the kitchen. It is mentioned in my favorite book Super Baby Food by Ruth Yaron in details in how to be successful. I was a little less focused, but it was great to only have one great big mess rather than doing a little every day. Though I will now admit that on most of the veggies I seem to use frozen ones, cook them and then refreeze. I haven’t had a child get sick (though both sides of my family have rocks for stomach’s). Ask your pediatrician if it is okay for your little one before trying this. I keep meaning too.

I don’t like doing home made cereal as above. Though my Cuisinart did just find grinding up rice and beans to make Super Baby Porridge from the Super Baby Food book……. I really enjoyed this book. I also stayed away from making home made yogurt. Something about the million times the author instills fear into me about everything being extremely clean and no contamination. Too many possibilities for error I say. Another food I just didn’t really conquer was protein. I didn’t fret over it much until they could eat finger foods. I fed egg yokes and tofu the first few months of doing the foods. Around 10 months I started adding in chicken breast in shreds or sandwich meat (though not really a bright spot in my healthy home made making baby food moments, but it works).

My favorites: Both had and have a hearty staple of Avocado. A very nutritional food. Easy in that no cooking necessary and it seemed filling to them. The other fun in it was that it wasn’t in a jar anywhere that I could buy. And Adeline's first La Fiesta food was guacamole. I’m sure it wasn’t just like mom’s either. She downed it even faster than usual. Also note: Do not get the lighter green skinned ones if possible. I always have trouble peeling those. And definitely don’t get hard ones. I had to cook my last batch just to make it edible for Esther, rather than having her attempt to eat rocks.

Peas – difficult on many levels. One you have to have cooked them for a very long time to get them tender enough to blend in the mini Cuisinart blender. Two, they almost always give my girls the runs if they eat them more than a couple times in a week. My favorite time to serve peas is once they are able to eat them as a finger food. Very easy to take along and allow them to defrost in route to dinner or wherever.

Spinach – don’t freeze a whole cube of it. It seems to be WAY too much and Esther won’t eat it. However, if I sneak smaller amounts into her lunch, etc it goes down just fine. A whole bag of fresh spinach made like 8 cubes, if that. So it is pretty dense stuff. I simply put a bunch in a bowl (pulling of the larger stems) then adding a little water, cover with cling wrap and microwave very for less than a minute.

Tofu - excellent source of protein. I have only bought the soft kind from Publix. Then cut it up in the small pieces. Save enough out for a week (just estimating) and the freeze the rest (I prefer to do so in individual meal sized servings - cube or ice tray method). When freezing be sure to cover it with water. (lasts 2 months). I did notice that freezing made the tofu a bit more sponge like. I was very careful to mush it up in food after freezing. Also... when refrigerating you have to change the water EVERY day! Though I seemed to have forgotten about this wonderful food after giving to Essie at first ... but am getting back to it now as a finger food.

Walnuts - can be given rather early. It was 9months I added some ground up in peaches for Esther. She didn't even seem to notice. This was likely one of her early forms of protein.

Applesauce- It is cheaper to buy the organic kind by the can fruits than the baby jar food kinds. Also even more so is the "no sugar added" versions over organic. It seemed way to laborouse for me to peel and then cook apples to get so very little.

Now what: Once frozen I usually pull out the cubes I need the night before I need them to send them to daycare. If heading to church and I want to ensure they don’t warm to quickly I pull them out the morning before depending on the food. Bananas for instance defrost very quickly, while avocado takes forever and I would always get it out the evening before.

A recent trick I have tried was to buy canned peaches. They seem to be hard to find at my grocery stores in pieces in pear juice (rather than syrup). So I cut them up and put them on a pan and then into the freezer for a couple of hours. Then once they were frozen I put them in a Ziploc. It makes finger food a very easy grab and go. I tried this also with broccoli (cooked first, then into bite size pieces before I put it back to the freezer – again… I think this is a big no no, but my girls haven’t gotten sick when I freeze something after cooking it). Check it out with your pediatrician before trying. I actually used a bacon cooking pan for the microwave. For the peaches it actually allowed the juice to roll down to the grease tray. Though I do believe a regular flat one would have worked just as well.

I will say that once you have made their food it is a lot harder to just throw away the extras. I am very careful to only thaw what she will need. I tend to feed this food first and then finish up with finger foods once we are at that stage of eating with our fingers or fists.

Below is what the cube system looks like (these are the 2oz version, I actually owned the 1oz version):

I’m sure you could envision it… but the ice cube tray with a lid:

Please leave a comment of any tricks you have learned or other things you have to share. I love learning from other Mommies.

[though as I am posting this Bryan melted my miniprep... we shall see if it still works or not...opps! thanks for cleaning up after me!!!]