on baby food

Feeding my kid homemade baby food is both more and less annoying than I had anticipated. Before diving into it, I was thinking that the annoying part would be the act of making baby food: washing, prepping, cooking, pureeing, storing. Turns out that it’s pretty easy; I’m used to turning apples into applesauce and prepping vegetables anyway, and peeling peaches turned out to be much simpler than I had anticipated. Pureeing is also a snap with our stick blender. (Mine is a decade-old Braun hand blender that I also use for soups and milkshakes. I love it to pieces.)

colorful ice trays of baby purees

The kid is eating (somewhat) local and organic above; the green beans and spinach were from the freezer aisle at the supermarket, but the sweet potato came from the farmer’s market, and the beef is from Wagon Wheel Ranch.

Storage is also easy; after making a puree, it’s simple to smush it into covered ice trays and freeze overnight, and then plop the cubes into freezer bags for storage.

bagged baby blocks

I put them in the fridge to defrost overnight, and in the morning I mash them up and package them for daycare.

No, the issue is that the baby keeps eating, which means I need to keep cooking. He currently eats up these little cubes at the rate of about four a day, plus half a banana, and occasionally shows signs of wanting more. Back when his diet was more limited, it felt like I was making applesauce and steaming carrots all the time. Now I can mix it up.

Oh, and another thing I didn’t anticipate: the sheer volume of dishes to wash. He goes through two or three tiny containers a day. We originally bought these Oxo containers for freezing, but food defrosts so slowly in the containers that I now just use them for packaging meals for daycare. They’re the perfect serving size for him. However, each one splits into four parts for washing; they never dry all the way in the dishwasher, so we hang them on a drying rack and then reassemble them when dry. Sometimes it feels like I now spend a large fraction of my time shuttling baby food storage parts back and forth from dishwasher to drying rack to countertop to refrigerator to daycare and back again.

It’s okay; if I’ve learned anything from parenting so far, it’s that all stages are temporary. Soon I can send him to school with finger foods instead of purees… and then, when he’s older, maybe he can even pack his own lunches! Hopefully he’ll still like vegetables.

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