Making Homemade Baby Food

It really is easier than you think to make your own baby food. I was terrified even at the prospect of feeding solids to my little girl. Breastfeeding is so easy! When they are hungry, you nurse them, when they are fussy, you nurse them…easy as pie! Nothing to think about.

When my daughter was five months old, I realized I needed to start thinking about the next phase in her culinary life. Solids. The next big adventure! I planned to start with rice cereal at six months of age and go from there. While I was overwhelmed at the thought of having to plan three meals a day and figure out how to give her a wide variety of healthy foods, the thought of what to feed her was even worse. Do I buy the jars or make it myself?

It took one trip to the baby food aisle at our local, low-cost grocery store to answer my question. I was making it myself! Why on earth would I buy a jar of strained bananas for seventy five cents when I could mash up half a banana for only pennies. So began the journey. Now, I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not a stickler by any means! If it makes sense to me to cheat then by golly cheat I will. But after whipping up a few delicious (and some gag-worthy) meals for my baby, I realized that doing it yourself really isn’t so bad after all.

Easy to use Utensils

Thankfully, because of some generous wedding gifts, I had everything I needed right in my kitchen cupboard. So far, I’ve found all I really need is a blender, a hand mixer (or stick mixer), a large mixing bowl, a spatula, and some ice cube trays. How easy is that? Generally, the stick mixer works the best and makes for the easiest cleanup. I put my cooked product in a large bowl, blend it up by hand and I’m done. But some foods, like meats, need a little more work and for those I use the blender.

Getting Started with Vegetables

I started with sweet potatoes and it was extremely easy. I washed them, poked holes in them, wrapped them in foil and baked at 400 degrees for just over an hour, until they were tender all the way through. I cut an X in the skin which then easily peeled away. Cut into chunks, whiz the hand blender through until soft and voila! Baby food! That is the basic formula for all the vegetables I’ve done. You can choose to boil, steam, or bake. Make sure they are washed and peeled if necessary and cook until quite soft. I’ve done carrots, peas, and green beans also so far with no problems. Peas and green beans are a little trickier because they have a “skin”. My baby gags on them so I just thin them with a little water or breast milk before serving them and she does fine.

Getting Started with Fruits

Fruits are just as easy as vegetables. So far, I’ve done apples, pears, and apricots. Bananas can be mashed up right before a feeding. Alternately, if you want to teach your little one some feeding skills (and work on that pincer grasp) just cut the banana into very small pieces and let your baby have fun learning to eat.
Apples and pears I simply peeled, cut into chunks and steamed with a small amount of water. I blended them up with the stick mixer, adding some of the cooking water and they were done. They are so delicious I have a hard time not eating them myself. Apricots were a little trickier. I cut them in half, took out the pits, baked them face down in a small amount of water until soft, then pulled off the peels. The problem is they are a bit sour. And a bit stringy. This was the first food my baby threw back up. But if they are mixed with baby cereal, they go down much smoother.

Cheating with Baby Food Jars

At this point, using the jarred food just makes more sense in some areas. Our apricots are sour because they aren’t in season. Peaches are not in season yet either. I don’t see what is so wrong with using jars so my baby can have some more variety in her diet. And to be honest, I feel overwhelmed at the thought of boiling and pureeing prunes at this point. It sounds like messy business. So I bought a couple jars to keep in the pantry. Is that really so bad?

Making Meat into Baby Food

Here is one area where I actually planned to use jarred baby food and ended up making my own. The thought of pureeing meat sounded quite awful as far as I was concerned. My trip to the baby food aisle had me changing my mind pretty quickly. The jars of just plain chicken or beef, without added vegetables or pasta, were $1.50 for a small jar! And the ingredient list included spices, but didn’t name which spices. Maybe I’m a little picky but I’d like to know exactly what I am feeding my baby. I didn’t want to buy the casserole type meats because I hadn’t yet introduced pasta and white potatoes into her diet.
I ended up buying some extra lean ground beef and chicken breasts. I poached the chicken to keep it from getting dry, cut it into pieces, and pureed in the blender with some water. The outcome was not pretty. It was like a runny chicken pudding. But my daughter ate it up no problem! Once you freeze them in ice cube trays, they thaw out to a much firmer texture. I used the same method with the beef, only fried it in the pan instead of poaching.

Storing and Serving Baby Food

As I’ve mentioned above, I simply pour my purees into ice cube trays, freeze for a few hours, then store the cubes in labeled freezer bags. They should be good in there for about a month. I try not to make batches that are too large to minimize the length of time they stay in the freezer. When meal time rolls around, I take out the cubes I want and heat them in a small frying pan over medium-low heat. They thaw very quickly and if they seem too hot, I pour some cold water in to thin and cool them off. I don’t use much liquid when making my purees as I prefer to thin them if necessary at her meal time.
If you are more organized than I am, you can take the cubes you need out of the freezer and store them in the fridge for a few hours and they should be thawed and ready to eat within a few hours.

Give Baby Food Cooking a Try

After reading the above, I hope you’ll give this adventure a try. It is not as daunting as I thought it would be and it is actually very fun to watch my little girl gobble up something that I myself made for her. It’s a good preparation for the days where she will be eating whatever her mom and dad are having for dinner. And you can’t beat the money savings!