Epic Babyfood Making

This past weekend I finished what I would refer to as the week of baby food making. It was intense, it was exhausting, I'm so glad it's over with. I am also so glad I did it. I was having a really hard time getting creative with Sadie's food. I felt like all I was feeding her was one fruit or vegetable at a time. That's where this book came in handy:

Oh yes, I 100% felt dumb buying a book of babyfood recipes, I mean it's all just steam and puree, right? Well, yes most of it is steam and puree, but what I loved about this book is that it told me what foods to combine together. I didn't have to worry about if carrots and squash would be good together or not. I never would of thought to combine chicken, sweet potatoes and apples, but sounds pretty good, doesn't it? A lot of the recipes also use spices and herbs which I've read are good to introduce babies to so they do not have a hard time with them later, I guess something about it making for a less picky eater since it's stuff they have been eating all along.

I did get a little freaked out with how to plan my shopping list, so I picked out 8 recipe to double and wrote down all the ingredient just adding tick marks next to duplicate veggies. I doubled the recipes for several reasons:

• we were totally out of the last batch of food we had made so I knew I needed a lot
• most of the recipes I chose said they only made 4 servings
• I needed to make food to last to the middle of November, the next time we will have a free weekend with both Robert and I at home

I could never find how much one of their servings was but after reading a few of the recipes I  decided each one was probably around 2 ounces. WRONG, at minimum we got 16-2.5oz servings out of each recipe, several were up in the 20's. I have not done an exact count on how many servings we ended up with but I'm sure it's easily over 100. I am totally ok with this, hopefully by the time we run out Sadie will be onto finger foods!

The Saturday that we started all this, we woke up early loaded up in the truck and drove down to the Farmers Market to buy most of what we needed, I even bought chicken! I've never bought meat at the farmers market before, I felt so fancy! $60 later we headed to the grocery store to pick up the rest of what we needed and headed home.

Only part of our bounty (sigh, yes my countertop extends UP my wall, it's lovely)

 Our process went like this:

• Meredith peels, chops and cooks the food while Robert plays with Sadie
• Robert dumps all the food into the food processor, purees it up and portions it out into our freezer containers while Meredith plays Sadie
• Robert washes dishes while Meredith drys and Sadie plays on the kitchen floor
• Repeat until out of freezer containers (we only have 32 containers)
• Once frozen, Robert runs a little hot water over them so Meredith can pop them out into a labeled ziploc bag and return them to the freezer 
• Robert washes all the containers while Meredith starts prepping for the next recipe or playing with Sadie
• Repeat until all recipes are done!

I had to make chicken stock, people! I'd never made my own chicken stock before, it was pretty easy just took a while. Store bought stock is full of sodium, even the low sodium kind, and babies are supposed to avoid sodium until a year or something like that.

We introduced Sadie to chicken and fish during all of this. Out of the 8 recipes I picked out 2 had chicken and one had fish, so far she seems to love them, but Sadie is a fantastic eater, we have not found anything yet that she does not like.

By Sunday evening we were totally done with 6 recipes and I had one that was done but just needed to be separated into the freezer containers. Thankfully Robert was home last week so we were able to knock the rest our pretty fast after Sadie went to bed.

Now you are totally wondering why, if I had 7 made last weekend did I just finish over this weekend. Well, I had a bunch of random stuff left over. Some I over bough (butternut squash) some came in large packages (carrots, spinach) so I used what I had left and made up two of my own recipes! There was no way I was going to let any of that produce go to waste.

I might have to make a fruit or two for Sadie's breakfasts to last us through the middle of November, but those are pretty easy, other than that we are all set!

I know I wont always be able to feed Sadie local or organic foods, but it makes me feel good that at least the first foods she is getting aren't chock full of pesticides or have been sitting in a warehouse for a week.

Anyone else out there making their own baby food and have any recipes to share?