How to Make Your Own Baby Food

I know a lot of people make their own baby food for various reasons. My two reasons are pretty simple and straight forward: 1) It's cost effective...big money saver! We have to purchase formula for our 6 month old because breastfeeding did not work for us (mommy and baby were very unhappy, which resulted in no production). I tried for a couple of months, with supplements as well, and nothing could make me produce more. So, with the added cost of formula buying baby food would easily put us over our grocery budget each month. 2) I like to know exactly what my little guy is getting. Now, I'm not this huge "everything must be organic" person, but I myself try to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables and I want my son to experience that too. Eventually he'll be eating foods just like mommy and daddy and we don't eat our bananas from a jar so why should he?

Now, before I had my son I always thought the idea of making your own baby food was...well, ridiculous. I had it in my head that it was incredibly time consuming and difficult. Given our current situation I decided to do some research and I found some different websites and blogs that were actually helpful and made it seem MUCH less scary. This is one of them. So simple. So straightforward. So how I like it.

Here's a rundown of my first experience whipping up a batch of green beans and a small batch of sweet potato.

As you can see, I used an ordinary blender to puree the food and I purchased some of those flexible ice trays (they're nice, but regular ice trays are just as good). I decided to try the frozen steamable green beans. They worked just fine.

I added a little bit of water (breastmilk is just fine as well, but as I mentioned, I'm out :-p) as I pureed the green beans to get it to the consistency I wanted (not too thick so baby can swallow it easily, but also not too runny). The only thing I would do differently is pour part of the bag of green beans in the blender at a time. I dumped the whole bag in thinking it would be fine, but because green beans have a bit of a thicker 'skin' it was difficult to puree it to the consistency I wanted. But my son doesn't have any trouble swallowing it now.

The sweet potatoes were much easier because they puree so much better. I washed and peeled the potato first, then cut it up into small chunks and put them in my steamer basket.

I actually had these steaming while I made the pureed green beans. Took about 10 minutes or so to soften. Since I only did one potato this time I threw all of it into the blender. Again I added water to get the consistency I wanted, then poured them into my trays.

I left them in the freezer for a few hours to harden. I popped them out on the counter and placed them in labeled ziploc bags (with the date) and then lined up each 1 oz cube so it would stack easily in the freezer. We have a drawer in the bottom of our freezer that I emptied out so it could be used for our bags of baby food. Perfect.

I usually try to take out enough food the night before so it can thaw out in the refrigerator, but on days I forget, which does tend to happen, I nuke it in the microwave for about 10 seconds and make sure it's cool enough to eat.

I DO NOT MAKE BABY FOOD EVERY WEEK. Goodness knows I'd go crazy! I set aside one single day and knock it out. Baby food lasts up to 3 months in the freezer, so I usually double the batch and freeze away! I've made applesauce, pear, avocado, more sweet potato, broccoli and am planning some new additions in the next few weekends to try out. The website I mentioned above is great for starting out :)

What other kinds of baby foods should I make?