Mmmm.. Homemade Baby Food!

It has taken me way too long to blog about Catie Grace's baby food, but here it is!  We started CG on solid food at 4 months.  She spent about a month just eating rice cereal mixed with breast milk (no, I wasn't even attempting to make rice cereal!)  At about 5 months, we started introducing one vegetable a week until she had tried all of the stage 1 vegetables, then moved on to fruits.

We mostly fed Catie Grace the food I made, but if we were traveling or on the go, we gave her Gerber stage 1 food.

Below I have outlined my system for making baby food.  It isn't fancy and there really isn't anything complicated to it, but here we go:

Generally I start the process by buying assorted frozen fruits and vegetables.   I steam the vegetables on the stove or in the microwave before I blend it.  I've found that you really don't have to steam the frozen fruits as they blend easily.

Yum!  Isn't your mouth just watering?

Some of the frozen fruits and veggies.

After I steam the vegetables, I put them in the blender to puree.  I also add water, but I don't measure it.  I just put enough water in the blender to avoid the terrible noise our blender makes when you don't have enough liquid. (Very scientific)  I blend the fruits the exact same way.

Once the fruits or vegetables are blended, I put the puree into ice cube trays.  Now this is actually a part of the process where I have become very picky.  We started out using really cheap, plastic ice cube trays.  Regular ice cube trays are a great serving size, but those cheap trays cracked within a few uses.  We are now using silicone ice cube trays which are much better!  Not only are they lasting longer, but the food is easier to get out.  Gerry and I have discussed that silicone muffin pans would be a good idea for Catie Grace as she gets older and is eating more.  When we first started, she would eat a few cubes of food at a time, but now she's up to 6 at a time.

Cg's food- ready to freeze!  These were the cheap trays before we chucked them all.

The last thing I do with CG's food is that I pop the food cubes out of their trays and put them in ziploc bags.  I label the bags so I know exactly what I'm giving Catie Grace to eat.  The labeling is important because pureed green beans, peas, and mixed veggies look exactly the same!

The labeled bags in our refrigerator.  Voila!

As I typed that out, it seemed really tedious and monotonous, but it really isn't.  The whole process really only takes about 30 minutes tops, and since I make the food in a big batch, I can make several batches of fruits and vegetables in just a few hours.

So the practicality in the way I do her food is that it's really not much more work and it is much cheaper than buying the individual food servings.  When I go to feed Catie Grace, I get one of her bowls and add  3 ice cubes of vegetables and 2 ice cubes of fruit.  She likes them mixed together, but you could easily make 2 separate bowls.  I heat up the cubes in the microwave for 1 minute, stir, and then heat 1 more minute.  Once the cubes have melted, the mixture is usually a bit runny for CG's taste so I thicken it with some rice cereal (again, I don't measure- I just thicken it until it looks right).  We use the whole wheat Gerber rice cereal.

We also give Catie Grace fresh fruit like pureed bananas and anything in season.  One of the easiest things we give her is just unsweetened applesauce.  It is her absolute favorite thing to eat!

Since Catie Grace is getting older now, she is getting away from the pureed foods and wanting more regular food.  We still try to give her the baby food at each meal, but sometimes (mostly at dinner) Catie Grace wants to eat what we are eating.

Oh the adventure that lie ahead!