Adventures in Making Baby Food

Izzie has spent the first two weeks on solids, eating rice cereal twice a day.  After two weeks of that, it was time to move onto veggies in the middle of the day between the two feedings of rice cereal.  With Brady, we bought all organic baby food jars and boy was it expensive.  He would go through 3 jars per day, so over the course of a month, it could cost $90 or more!  While I was pregnant, we were walking in a grocery store and Andy saw the jarred food and mentioned that he had heard of a lot of people making their own baby food.  He suggested we try it.  Since he does all of the cooking in our house, I told him I didn't suggest it because I didn't want him to have to do more work.  He said, you do it on the weekends and then you've got week's of food.  That was before she was born, and now here we are, time for her to start eating food.

The first batch was carrots and peas.  We had gotten a steamer at my bridal shower and had never taken it out of the box.  I can now say we've used it since for our veggies to accompany dinner.  Andy steamed the veggies, then threw them into the mini food processor.  He then placed them into ice cube trays (seen in the picture at the top of the post) and we let them set in the freezer before popping them out.  We've lost one of them because we let them set too long and when we twisted it, it broke in half.

 A week after Andy made the first batch, it was time for Izzie to eat her first veggies.  We started with the carrots.  She made a face when she got a taste of a new texture, but soon she was gobbling it up.

Andy's next batch was squash, green beans, plums, and bananas.  He boiled the plums for a few minutes to cook them.

He placed the plums in an ice bath after boiling them to loosen the skins.

Food processor time.

Of the four veggies, Izzie has tried so far, she only has balked at the green beans.  She still ate about half the bowl though.  Other veggies we plan to make for her in the future include broccoli, sweet potatoes, and avocados.  She has one more week and then she'll start having fruit in her morning cereal and with lunch.  The reasoning for her eating veggies for two week before starting fruit is because veggies aren't as sweet.  If they have sweet fruits first, they might not want to eat the veggies. We took this same approach with Brady and he still loves veggies to this day.