Baby Food: A Journey

I decided early on that I would try making my own baby food and just see how it goes. I wasn't totally hard core, I didn't make my own baby cereal and teething biscuits and all that fun stuff.

What I liked:

• Being able to completely control the texture and ingredients of the food I was feeding Garrett.
• Being able to do everything in bulk and having a large selection of things to choose from.

What was hard:

• The time it took to make enough food to have a good selection and enough for us and daycare. Between cooking, pureeing, freezing and storing sometimes it would take a total of three days to get everything completely finished, and that was if I stayed on top of it.
• The planning and time it took to make sure that we had a good selection, so that Garrett wasn't eating the same things.
• Traveling. It is hard to take frozen baby food on a longer trip... You either waste it because it is defrosted but not eaten or have to count on having a microwave to warm it up.

I will definitely make baby food again hands down. Being able to control the consistency and ingredients was well worth it. A couple of things that I learned was that if something isn't pureeing very well add lots of extra liquid. We had a small food processor and a big one. Honestly, I thought that both were necessary. The big one I used in the beginning when I was making bulk of a lot of different things. The small one we used A LOT for the in between stage when he could eat what we were eating but it had to be pureed. I often put a whole meal in the thing and whipped her right up. Now he is eating mostly table food and I hardly puree anything. I still freeze stuff though, so that he has a meal when we are eating something that he can't really have, like steak.

I would freeze lentils and cous cous for a starch, and then freeze ground pureed turkey, steak and pork and lots of veggies. For a meal I would pull out a cube of each and mix them together, that way we could mix up flavors so he didn't get the same thing all the time.

It has been hard trying to find something to feed him while we are dieting. Yesterday evening I actually took the time to cook him a spinach and butternut squash lasagna. SO GOOD...and he seemed to like it. I cut the 9x9 lasagna into 16 pieces and now they are in the freezer. Hopefully that will help with the "I don't have anything to feed him that is halfway healthy and not processed" 5:30 panic. I think the challenge now is find a variety of "big boy" foods that are easy to prepare/throw together and aren't supper processed.