Making Baby Food, Attempt One

Over the course of two nights, I made baby food for the first time.  Now, before you think it must have been a horrible experience to take so long, I can say that it wasn't.  It was lack of preparation that caused the delay.  Learn from my mistakes!  :)

I had seen a recipe book at the lactation boutique and thought making baby food was an interesting idea, but I didn't think about it too seriously until my friend sent me a link to a website with recipes.  I decided to buy foods for Kira to see if she liked them before I made a bunch of anything, and there are several organic brands that are pretty good. 

One of Kira's favorite foods so far is sweet potatoes, and the recipe seemed easy, so I decided to make those first.  I bought two organic sweet potatoes and baked them.  It took about an hour and fifteen minutes at 400 degrees in my average-quality oven.  Getting the 'meat' out was pretty easy.  I could pretty much pull the skin off the potato after it had baked (and cooled, of course).  I tried mashing the sweet potatoes with some water by hand, but it was a little thicker than I wanted.  I think the consistency would have been fine if Kira was a month or two older, but at five months, I wanted it to be smooth.  This is where the second night came in--I had just put Kira to bed, and there was no way I was getting out the blender at that point!

So the following afternoon, I put the refrigerated sweet potatoes in the blender to finish smoothing them out, then put the mix in a couple of ice cube trays to freeze.  Two sweet potatoes filled two trays!  Considering how little Kira eats at this age, she will have sweet potatoes for a long time.  Thankfully, they will last a while in the freezer!

I'm pleased with this first experiment.  It was very easy, and I could do other things while the sweet potatoes were baking.  If I'd known that I would want to put them in the blender, I could have skipped hand-mashing and finished this even more quickly.  And best of all?  We spent about $3 on about 24 servings of organic sweet potatoes, compared to $1.50 for two servings of store-bought organic baby food.