Making Baby Food

I don’t know when I turned into such a “natural” person, but when the idea of starting solid foods came up when I first had Ainsleigh I thought as a working mom I would never have time to do this. Cloth diapering and homemade baby food is for people who live in the mountains and stay at home with their children right….ha ha well things change once you have your own child in your arms and you really “crunch” the numbers.

I started looking into the different ways people make purees for babies. You can get a magic bullet, you can use a food processor or blender, you can get a food mill or you can get this amazing little machine”, the Babycook (its a French product and is only available from two stores in the US. “Williams-Sonoma and “Giggle).

I researched this a whole lot and found that many people found that blenders, food processors and even the magic bullet left the food a little too chunky for infants and the food mills sold at baby stores are a little cheap and tend to break easily.

Will and I went to Williams-Sonoma to talk to them about the Babycook (I was leary to buy it for $150). The woman at WS told me that they had never had one returned and had never ever heard any complaints about it. She even said they had moms waiting in line the first weekend they sold them.

I read a ton of reviews online and never found a negative one. So with a gift certificate I had for Giggle.com we bought our very own Babycook.

I have made green beans, applesauce, pearsauce and butternut squash. Up until last night I had only made one thing at a time but I went out and bought some freezer cube”s and made a whole lot of food.

The Babycook is so great because you just put the water in to steam the veggies/fruits and then leave it, it automatically turns off, then you pour out the water and flip the steamer basket over. The bottom of the main cup has a blade in it. Then you just turn it on blend/puree mode and it chops it all up into a baby puree in under a minute.

I had a bunch of fruit and veggies that I wanted to make for her and instead of doing one different thing every night, I decided to have a little marathon of cooking last night.

I made three batches of sweet potatoes (two full size sweet potatoes), one batch of butternut squash (one squash), one batch of acorn squash (one squash), one batch of pear sauce (three pears) and one batch of applesauce (two apples). Here is what our freezer looks like after my big cooking night.

So now we have 45 servings of fruit along with some bananas and avocado’s for Ainsleigh to eat. She is really doing so well with solids, she is even opening her mouth in anticipation of the food on the spoon. This past week before she got sick she had apples and pears at day care and her day care provider, Maria was really impressed with what a good eater she is.

She really loves butternut squash, pears and bananas, here she is after some butternut squash.