Take Three!

Turns out my burnt carrot fiasco the other day wasn't necessarily a bad thing! I read yesterday that carrots have a high level of nitrates in them and that it's better to wait to introduce them until after age 7 months. So, I decided to do squash instead.

I bought two huge butternut squash, about 2 pounds each. This time I only cooked one of them! I sliced 'em in half and baked them in 1-2 inches of water for almost an hour. After they cooled, I tossed 'em in my lovely new Cuisinart blender and whirled them with some breastmilk until they were the perfect consistency for a stage 1 baby food. I still chose to put them through my strainer, then put the purée into my ice cube trays. It worked out beautifully! I ended up with 2 trays of squash plus a little to put in the fridge to let Chase try for dinner last night.
The clean-up was such a breeze!


I think I'm finally getting the hang of this baby food stuff! It's about time! :)

Posted from my iPhone

More Baby Food Woes

Today I was going to make Chase some carrot baby food. I put the carrots in the steamer basket over a pot of boiling water and popped the lid on top. After 15 minutes, the carrots weren't quite soft enough. I set the timer for another 5 minutes, checked them again and they still weren't soft enough. I let them continue to steam while I played with the kids until...

Uh, oh. What's that smell?

At first I thought a plastic container or lid was caught in the bottom of the dishwasher that was running. You know, that lovely burning/melting aroma? But I checked the dishwasher and all was well. That only left one option:

My carrots.

I checked 'em and sure enough they were finally soft! The problem, however, was that the pot of boiling water had, well, run out of water.

Eeew. That smell. I checked the pot and it was quite possibly the worst kitchen mishap on my record! Here's a shot of the pot after it had been soaking in hot, soapy water for about 20 minutes.


As you might imagine, I tossed the carrots since they were infused with that lovely burnt smell and I didn't think it'd be fair to Chase for his first introduction to carrots to be quite so eeeewy.

Guess it won't hurt to keep him on sweet potatoes for another day. Lord knows I have enough of 'em!

((sigh))

Posted from my iPhone

Kitchen Disaster (again)

Well, it was time for another round of baby food. I started Chase on green beans back on Sunday, April 25th. You know how you're supposed to wait 3-4 days before starting another food to be sure there's no allergy, right? Well, day 4 would've been the day we left for Cincinnati (family vacation!) and I was not about to start a new food while on the road away from home. SO... the poor guy was left with green beans for an entire week! So Monday I went to the store and decided it was sweet potato time. Now, you remember this post where 1 pound of green beans resulted in a HUGE kitchen disaster and a measly 12 cubes of baby food? Well, that was not going to happen to me again, no siree bob! So, without thinking (that's just how I live my life), I bought 8 sweet potatoes.

Eight large sweet potatoes.

I read that the best way to cook them was baking them in the oven, so I cleaned them really good, poked 'em with a fork, wrapped 'em in foil and baked 'em for close to 2 hours. They were all kinds of soft and mushy when I took them out of the oven -- just what I wanted! I let them cool for a bit then got to work.

And work I did! Ohmygoodness! I had NO IDEA how much potato I'd be working with. It was insane. Every time hubs walked by the kitchen, I'd hear him mutter, "Man, that's a lot of sweet potatoes!" As if I didn't already know. Men.

So I'm working away with my blender, trying to show these sweet potatoes who's in charge, and my blender... well, it died. The motor started crying out for help, but when I wouldn't address it, it started smelling like burnt somethin'-or-other. Eeew. I gave up on my blender and borrowed my sister's (she conveniently lives down the street from us).

So two blenders later, I finally was able to finish up this mess of sweet potatoes. See how much fun I had? See how it resulted in the same kitchen disaster as the green beans? This time with two blenders instead of one blender and one massive food processor.

See that square container in the middle of the chaos? Ya, that'd be my NINE CUP tupperware container. Yes, NINE cup. I filled it to the top, to the point that the sweet potatoes squished up against the lid when I attempted to close it. Wow.

I've only got 2 covered ice cube trays, so it's been a continual process of taking the baby food from the frige, filling up the two trays, freezing them, then starting over again. Three days and FOUR trays of sweet potato cubes later, I still have over half a container left to go:

((sigh))

On a related note, yesterday I was at Costco buying formula (I've officially quit nursing... more on that later) and decided to scope out their selection of small appliances. I found (what I hope to be) the mother-load! It's a Cuisinart combination blender AND food processor. The food processor holds 2.5 cups so it's big enough to handle a lot of food but not so big that the food just sits at the bottom under the blade. And the blender is a lovely, heavy glass container (mine was cheapy plastic, not to mention about 10 years old) and the base/motor on this thing looks massive! My favorite thing is that it's shiny. It doesn't take much for me, people.


SO... while my introduction to making my own baby food has been somewhat overwhelming and it's clear I have a lot to learn in order to get into a good groove (buying and making the "right" amount of fresh veggies & fruits, etc.), looking at this face is all the encouragement I need to keep doing what I'm doing:

Have I mentioned how much I love this boy?!

Baby Food!

So I've decided to be adventurous this time around and make Chase's baby food myself. I figure, I'm a stay-at-home-mom, I don't have any "real" work to do (lol!) so surely I have plenty of time to create baby food from scratch, right?

I had no clue where to begin. I asked a fellow blogger who happens to be very experienced with this subject, and she pointed me to this website for all the information a person could ask for when it comes to making homemade baby food.

I was **this close** to starting Chase out on applesauce, only because I had a huge bag of apples that I wasn't sure LO and I would get through before they started to go bad. But we started LO on green beans when she first began solids. And I've heard the talk that you're supposed to start a baby on vegetables and work your way through veggies before offering fruit. So I resolved out of nothing less than guilt to go with the green bean plan.

I didn't own a food processor. I thought I had always wanted one. They seemed to cool, so capable. So I bought one. I figured the old, plastic blender I had stowed in a cupboard for the past 5+ years wouldn't be capable of preparing baby food.

The massive 8,000-cup food processor I bought was big. It had a lot of parts. It was confusing at times. But I muddled my way through, washed the bad boy and got ready to begin.

I chose to steam my fresh green beans. I bought a pound of 'em for about $2.50. Once they were slightly cooled, it was time to toss 'em into the food processor. I tossed. I processed. My green beans got all chunky and sat at the bottom of the processor while the blade spun madly about 1/2 inch above said green beans. I used my spatula to move things around a bit, put the lid back on and tried again.

To no avail.

My green beans looked awful. They were all chunky and there was nothing "pureed" about them. I was distraught! This wasn't supposed to happen! What am I doing wrong?

Before giving it much though, I pulled the ol' blender out of the cupboard, put my green bean chunks in it and gave it a whirl. Wouldn't ya know I started to see beautifully processed and pureed green beans, that which Gerber would be jealous of?

Finally!

I added some of the liquid from the steaming to get the consistency I wanted and BAM! I ended up with lovely green bean baby food! Yay!

Disregard the fact that my kitchen turned upside-down and was a total nightmare. Honest.


See? It was awful.

Next, I placed the green bean puree into my ice cube tray. How perfect (yet somewhat defeating) that it completely filled ONE ice cube tray. Yes, one pound of green beans equals 12 approximately 1-ounce cubes of baby food. I think I was expecting so much more for all my trouble (and my husband's trouble since I put him in charge of kitchen clean-up!).


I got over it and popped the tray in the freezer (side note: I bought the OXO brand trays that come with a lid so I didn't have to worry about messing with parchment paper or foil, which could leave foil pieces in the food).

Turns out right now, my little guy will only eat about 1/2 to 1 cube at each feeding, so these cubes have gone a long way already! I was going to do a cost-basis analysis to see how this compares to buying baby food (about $1.09 for two 2.5-ounce packs) but honestly the numbers gave me a headache and I decided against it. All I know is I enjoyed this process (more so figuring out what works and what doesn't) and I especially love the fact that I know exactly what went into my son's baby food. And there's a sense of pride in all of that.

So I guess I'll keep on with this! I might jump into squash next (as I have NO IDEA how to make/find peas, unless I buy them frozen), then on to carrots, sweet potatoes and then fruit! Yay!