Saturday, March 20, 2010

Making baby food

Making baby food is really a simple task that can save you a lot of money in the long run.

A tub of baby food is about $.63/each and you go through one a day in the beginning, and 3 a day eventually. Lauren will be eating 1 a day. If you figure that I did a batch of sweet potatoes for $3.00 (lasts 2 weeks) and I would have paid about $8.75 for this in the store, I saved about $6. Once she is eating 3 times a day obviously this will save us $18 every couple of weeks... or about $40 a month!

**Side note - this is the first time I've ever boughten sweet potatoes or squash. I bought them regular price and have no idea if what I paid is a good deal for them or not.**

Another great thing about making your own baby food is that you can have a much greater variety. Think avacados, zucchini, mango, eggplant, etc.

So here we go:
Cut squash in half.


Scoop out seeds.

Handy Pampered Chef Core and More in action!

Scrub sweet potatoes, poke with fork and wrap in foil.


Stick in oven at 350. Walk away for about an hour.

Squash cut side down in with some water in the pan.

When you pull the sweet potatoes out of the oven, cut them open to cool so that you can pick them up and simply let the skins slide off. Make sure that you keep the foil under them as they are very sticky and I hear it takes a lot of work to get this off your pans.


I used an immersion blender first


and then blended to get that super thin runny consistency for baby's "1st" step foods.


Thin with water, breast milk or formula as needed.

Pour into ice cube trays.

Each cube is approximately 1 oz.

Freeze and then pop out of trays for easier storage in zip lock baggies!


I got 35 oz. from 3.5 sweet potatoes and 30 oz. from 2 butternut squash.

A great resource is WholesomeBabyFood.com.

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