Baby food part 2

Here is part two of my baby food making adventure. By the way, the end cost analysis totally confirmed why I should be doing this more: The amount of baby food this yielded would have cost me $15.40 and I made all of this food for under $3.00! 

When the timer goes off (after 3 hours on high), get out your awesome blender or food processor and get ready to do some pulsing (pulsating?). Anyway... 

Once cooked the potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots and spinach looked all yummy and stuff. If it looks like a lot of water is in the crock pot, don't worry. Once its all made up and stands overnight it will thicken on its own. Especially when making starchy vegetables like this. 

After pulsating on the highest level it would go to, I ended up with something resembling baby poop. 

Before I did anything else, I had to test it out on Gracie. After all, this is her grub. 

I got out her big spoon and just went for it. 

The immediate reaction was a little ambiguous.

Okay, very ambiguous.

But then she smiled and I knew she liked it. I tasted it too, and it was really good (for baby food). The sweet potato gave it just the right amount of sweetness.

I got out some storage supplies. I learned on the internet and from my mother-in-law that ice trays make excellent baby food storage. Each cube holds about an ounce of food.

Getting ready to freeze baby poop.

And just pop it into your freezer. Just like that.  I read later you should cover the ice trays with plastic wrap. I didn't do this and they ended up just fine, but you may want to do it to take sanitary precautions.  Once they freeze I will just pop them out of the tray and put them all into big zip lock freezer bag.  

I figured we would be using this much in the next few days, so I kept some of it fresh. 

The yield works like this:

16 oz bag of frozen spinach

2 sweet potatoes

3 regular potatoes                          =            10 cups of baby food 

1 bag of carrots

It would have yielded more had I put more water in it like I needed to.  After researching a little more I found that homemade baby food costs about 1/10th of store bought.  

This experiment went extremely well. The only down side is the mountain of dishes it creates, but thats a small price to pay to save that much money. I'm going to save about $50.00 a month and plus all those trips to Target I make at the last minute when I run out. 

 

Thanks for reading.