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.  

Homemade baby food part 1

I am no hippie. I do live in California, but I don't recycle because I have bums who pick through my trash bin and do it for me. I use disposable diapers (on my daughter, not me), I drive a big minivan and I try not to walk anywhere if I can avoid it. Nobody walks in LA. Its true. 

So despite my anti-hippie lifestyle, I am today going to make my own baby food. I do this for a couple reasons, #1. I'm cheap and #2. I'm really cheap. I never miss a chance to use the ol' slow cooker so here goes my attempt at homemade baby food. 

I began with what I had in my fridge and pantry: potatoes, sweet potatoes and frozen spinach.

Chop up the potatoes and sweet potatoes into like size pieces, which normally is important but because a Crockpot is so forgiving, you could probably just throw the whole damn potato in and it would be fine. 

Get everything chopped and mixed, then remember you have carrots. 

Things got a little messy. 

By the way, the carrots were two degrees above freezing and my fingers just about froze from handling them. Remind me to turn up the temperature in my fridge.

Once everything is all chopped and mixed, pour in about a cup of water. *Edit: Once this was all cooked it and sat overnight it became very thick. Therefore, I'd recommend using three cups of water in a pot of starchy vegetables like this one. 

 Cook 3 hours on high and as Ron Popiel says, "Set it and forget it"

Baby spoons

My baby is big. She is in the 97th percentile for height and weight. She just turned 7 months old and weighs about 22-23 pounds. At birth she weighed 9 lbs 5oz and yes, I did deliver her the old fashioned way, through my VAGINA (love how that word makes everyone uncomfortable).

Anyway, I digress. I am giving Gracie 2 jars of expensive little baby food at every meal. Please don't get me started on the cost because I've already hatched a plan to circumvent the costs of that, but I don't want to talk about that here because its a much more boring post than this boring one I'm currently writing.

Ok, so the real reason for this post: Mothers guilt. The spoon I had been feeding her with were those cute little shallow baby spoons that aren't even baby spoons at all. They are little pieces of nearly flat soft plastic that hold the tiniest amount of baby food on them. It would take me 20 minutes to feed her with those tiny baby spoons. Here is the part I feel guilty over. I found these lovely honking huge spoons that someone gave me for my baby shower. They shovel in 10 times the amount of food as the little baby spoons and I AM LOVING THIS. Because now, I can feed her in 3 minutes instead of 20. And we all know that time is more precious than anything else when parenting. An extra 17 minutes to do, lets see, well how about nothing at all? Sounds good to me.

So of course, after I discover this, the evil voice in my head shows up and says: "Good moms don't try to figure out how to short change their kid so they can have more time to surf the internet." and "Good moms feed their dainty kids with dainty baby spoons and take the time to do it" AND "Your baby is going to grow up to be a large Marge, shoveling in chocolate ice cream with the biggest spoon on earth" Cut to a visual of 100ft tall Large Marge stomping around Los Angeles in search of chocolate ice cream.

Once again, I'm going to ignore that voice in my head because if she had her way with me, I would have a baby attached to my breast 24 hours a day, I would never go outside and everything in my life would be about how I can make my baby happy. Life just isn't like that. Babies aren't always happy and sometimes, in fact most of the time my baby is happy when I get an extra 17 minutes to surf the internet, because when mama is happy, everyone is happy.