Homemade Baby Food Part 1

L and I were raised by mothers who breastfeed for like two years, cloth diapered and made all their own baby food. I tried to breastfeed past six months, but it just didn't work out. We cloth diapered for the first three months, but then E went to daycare and into disposables. But! We make our own baby food! L, being a chef, can't wait to get to the real food, so I've been handling the purees and the mashes. I do cave and buy pouches in bulk from Amazon to have on hand when I'm too tired to whip up a batch of something or when E refuses to eat my offerings unless it's mixed with pears. Always have pears: good for making new tastes palatable and for constipated, formula-fed babies. See also: prunes.

Cooking baby food is so cheap and easy and I get to use my Cuisinart all the time. Here is the basic equipment I use to make Baby E's food.

cook: Mauviel saucepan / quarter sheet baking pan / parchment paper / rubber spatula / Cuisinart 9-Cup Food Processor / strainer

store:  Green Sprouts Freezer Cubes / jelly jars / Sharpie / painter's tape

I pick out the best looking, in-season produce at the farmers market or the grocery store.  I roast, blanch or boil the produce, throw it in the food processor, maybe add a little water, blend and then scoop into storage cubes. The Green Sprouts cubes are really handy for transporting Baby E's food to and from daycare since they are plastic and aren't likely to shatter on the bus on the way home. We have a bunch of Ball jelly jars kicking around from when we made jam for our wedding favors and they serve just fine to keep Baby E's food in the fridge at home. I just use the restaurant kitchen technique of slapping a piece of tape on the storage cube with the contents and the date it was made. In fact, all of our dry goods, perishable pantry staples and leftovers are labeled this way.

Some of our favorite recipes have come from Weelicious. Baby E especially loves the roasted apples with ginger and cinnamon and I love this simple red lentil recipe. I checked this book out from the library and it was a great primer for getting started, but a little boring if you're interested in giving your baby new flavors and textures. I use their dried fruit technique (boil dried apricots, prunes, etc. for a few minutes, then puree) to keep our stock of prune puree fresh on the cheap. A bag of dried prunes is around $4 and will yield more than enough puree for a month of eating, while a six-pack of prune puree pouches runs about $12 on Amazon.

Baby E doesn't always like what I make for him, so there is a fair amount of food waste involved. I feel a little better that I'm keeping costs very low and not throwing out expensive packaged food (and its packaging) if I just can't get E to eat certain things.