Making Baby Food: Part 2

Our freezer. 

In a previous post on the subject, I described how I make Molly's food. It has been fun, not overly time-consuming, and very, very cheap. Baby food costs $0.40-0.50/jar for fruit or veggies, and $0.70-0.90/jar for meat, depending on your grocery store. There is no reason to believe that store-bought baby food is bad for your child, full of preservatives, or will cause her to mutate. In fact, if you look at the labels, the closest thing to a preservative is ascorbic acid (vitamin C), which hardly counts. Therefore the reason I make my own is because it is so much cheaper.

My process has evolved since I started doing this, and in case anyone out there is planning to make baby food for his/her offspring, I thought I'd share some of the lessons I learned.

Briefly: choose a fruit or veggie, wash it, skin it, core it, boil it, grind it up in the food processor, pour it into ice cube trays, and freeze overnight. To serve, pull a few cubes out of the freezer and nuke them in a microwave-safe container. Stir in some iron-fortified single-grain cereal like oatmeal or rice cereal if you want, and add in some breast milk or formula to adjust the texture or temperature as needed.

Tips

1) Use silicone ice cube trays!!! All my cheap plastic trays are cracked and broken. The silicone ones don't do that, plus they are bendy and make it easy to push the cubes out.

2) If you want your baby to eat meat, make sure you camouflage it well. Meat is hard to puree and therefore hard to make the texture palatable for your infant. Chicken can be very stringy. I've found that cooking it all day in the slow cooker gets a better result than boiling. Despite video evidence to the contrary, Molly will eat meat if you drown out the taste and texture with other stuff-- especially sweet stuff. A typical meat meal for her therefore includes a cube of chicken/sweet potato + sweet peas + butternut squash. We've also successfully used peaches, pears, carrots, and sweet potatoes to drown out the meat. Note that all the meat cubes I made were already mixed with something else- sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, or rice. What I am describing is an additional layer of subterfuge. Oh and don't add too much breast milk or formula when you combine it to serve. This will make the puree thin and watery, effectively emphasizing the icky meat texture your baby hates so much (this is what happened in the video).

3) When boiling fruits and vegetables, you only need a small amount of water- much less than you might think. Fruits, especially, will contribute their own juice/water, and if you add too much exogenous water, the result will be thin and... watery.

4) Once frozen, remove the cubes from the trays and store them in quart bags. At first I thought I needed to store the cubes in the trays to keep them from sticking together. Not only is this not true, but it is a huge pain to pry cubes out with a knife every time you want to feed your baby.

I'm Molly's belly, and I approve this message.