Making Baby food

I'm anything but thrifty. I have boxes of hand-me-downs, but I still go out and buy clothes. There's just something so fun about picking out an outfit and then putting it on your baby. It's like playing with dolls but for adults. We have a ton of food stored away, and yet I still go out to eat all the time. By the time five o' clock rolls around I haven't even thought about what to make for dinner. But I really do try to save us money, and one way I try is by making baby food.

It's really quite easy. I mean sometimes convenience requires that you just go out and buy the stuff, but with some planning- and a visit to a case lot sale- you can save a little money.

Some people buy veggies and boil them, but I just buy cans of veggies at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has sodium free veggies (Western Family may as well). I, however, love my veggies full of salt, and I do not recommend buying sodium free for yourself. *gag* But for babies it works great.

We were using our cuisine-art to blend the veggies, but tonight we tried the blender and it worked fine.

After they are properly blended. We get out the scale and scoop 2 ounces into a bag. After a couple times you can sort of guesstimate the amount.



I date each bag, and then put them all in a bigger bag that has the name of the veggie on it. I also put the date on the big bag. Then I throw them in the freezer.



When I empty a big bag I just cross out the date on it and put it in the cupboard with the baby stuff until Craig and I find the time to puree some more.

Tips:
- The bigger the can the cheaper it is per ounce
- If you're going to do it do a lot at a time, or else it may get tedious
- Don't drain all the juice. It blends better if you leave some in. And when working with yams don't drain any of the juice.
- My boys do not like veggies, and it's sort of my fault since I gave them fruit first. Seriously giving them veggies is the most stressful thing in the world. They cry and spit it everywhere. They do, however like yams, so we have blended yams in with all the other veggies.
- Craig and I didn't wash the blender out when we switched to different veggies. After all there's no reason to worry about passing around peanut contaminants. Its all just veggies.

We haven't done fruit yet because we haven't needed too- we got a whole bunch of fruit on sale before the babies were born. But I'm sure all the same applies.

P.S. Sorry for all the posts. I'm trying to catch everything up. I should have started this a long time ago.