I decided before Isla was born that if we did go the route of purees (as opposed to baby-led weaning), we’d make them ourselves. I don’t know if you’ve looked in the stores. Even the “inexpensive” baby food is more expensive than what you can make at home, granted you have the time and the kitchen. So when we finally decided to introduce solids a la purees, we went out to the grocery store, loaded up on all the stage 1 foods the produce section had to offer, and brought it back to our house to make sweet, sweet (well, some of it is sweet) baby food.
Using Momtastic’s Wholesome Baby Food as our guide, we steamed, boiled, and pureed our way through apples, pears, prunes, papayas, mangos, peas, beans, and probably some other things I’ve already forgotten. While the chopping and peeling was more labor intensive than I originally anticipated, with my husband and I splitting the tasks, we were able to get through what I’m hoping will be a couple of months’ worth of homemade baby food in a handful of hours.
The only real hitch was at the beginning of the process when our Black & Decker Cyclone (more like gentle breeze) blender gave out and died. We’ve had the thing two years, used it maybe a half dozen times, and I vaguely recall having issues with it the last few times we used it. Total POS. You can google it and read the reviews on Amazon if you want to laugh and be slightly shocked about what sort of products have apparently been available in stores for years despite high rates of being completely worthless. But I digress. We got a Magic Bullet despite my husband’s protests that it’s too small, and it was indeed magic. It saved the day, and we will use the crap out of it from now on.
On the whole, our homemade baby food project was very successful. If you are thinking about undertaking this task, here are my recommendations:
- Make all of your baby food at once and freeze it. It will save you so much time in the long run and will make it more likely that you’ll stick with homemade baby food rather than caving to pricey store-bought stuff in a moment of, “I don’t have time to puree!” weakness.
- Invest in a good blender or food processor.
- You might also want to get a stick blender if you don’t already have one. (I recommend Cuisinart. We’ve had ours for 4 years with no issues!)
- You will need far more little plastic containers than you think. Buy a lot of them so you don’t have to go to the store because you run out of things to put your sweet potatoes in.
I’ll close with some fun photos from our day.
Hoon says
August 22, 2012 at 10:45 amWhen we (and by “we” I mean “SP”) made purees, we put them in ice cube trays. We used a food scale to make each cube approximately 1 ounce. Once frozen, we popped the cubes out of the trays and put them in labeled freezer zip-top bags.
That way, we could just count out the ounces we needed when it was eating time (or time to prepare meals for daycare/traveling/whatever). It also helped make it easy to count how much GP was eating.
Katie says
August 22, 2012 at 11:18 amYeah, we definitely thought about doing it that way, and it’s a great idea! I tried to figure out how many trays we’d need, though, and I realized they wouldn’t fit in our freezer. 😉
Katie says
August 22, 2012 at 11:20 amPS: I did use Sarah’s idea for doing it all at once. We’ve got pretty much all the purees we’re going to use already made, with the exception of the squash and sweet potatoes, which we ran out of time to do over the weekend. It was so much easier that way. We just got into the groove and went with it.
Hotpotatokate says
August 23, 2012 at 5:40 pmYou make me want to do purees! What made you decide to go the puree route in the end (it sounds from the post like you considered BLW at some stage)
Katie says
August 23, 2012 at 6:39 pmIsla isn’t getting enough to eat during the day. She’s too distracted during the day to nurse or take a bottle. She can seriously go the whole day and eat maybe twice, and then not enough to get full. It’s causing her to want to tank up at night instead, which is interfering with sleep. So hoping by adding solids, we’ll get some more calories in during the day (and so far, eating purees is waaaay more interesting than nursing) and less waking up at night.
Kylie M. says
June 23, 2014 at 12:27 pmThis is something I’ve wanted to do since we found out we are having a baby. Cant wait to try.
Joanne says
December 11, 2015 at 11:56 amYes! I would certainly make my own baby food again! Great post!
Lisa's Baby food Guide says
August 3, 2016 at 12:19 amOne of my friend’s little child (boy) in his age of 1yr 1 month months is suffering from acidic problems after having each meal. Can you plz suggest a diet or a meal which can help the child to digest the meal without creating acidity?
Katie says
August 10, 2016 at 1:42 pmI recommend she consult her pediatrician.