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<\/p>\nFeeding 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.)<\/p>\n
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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.<\/p>\n
Storage is also easy; after making a puree, it’s simple to smush it into covered ice trays<\/a> and freeze overnight, and then plop the cubes into freezer bags for storage.<\/p>\n I put them in the fridge to defrost overnight, and in the morning I mash them up and package them for daycare.<\/p>\n No, the issue is that the baby keeps eating<\/i>, 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<\/i>. Now I can mix it up.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. … Continue reading ![\"bagged](\"http:\/\/kitchen.wasteofbytes.com\/images\/bb-bags.jpg\")
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