Yummy Yummy

Today, baby food was made!

It's actually really exciting, and I've been wanting to do it for a while and finally got the guts to just jump in. It was totally inspired after a day with Farmer Nate & Carrie. They have been totally reevaluating their lives and what they eat and consume. It's crazy the amount of stuff we are actually taking in, but we'll leave that for another blog.

Thus, making Holden homemade baby food was top on my list!

To start it off we hit up this cute little produce stand on the way home from Nate & Carries.
( Like I said super inspired!)


We got:
Three pears
Three peaches
Three summer squash
Three sweet potatoes



(side note: make sure you ask where they came from and if they are organically grown if that's important to you. Just because it's at the stand doesn't mean it came from there! Thanks for the advice Carrie!)

Then comes washing, peeling, and chopping











The thing that was really cool was there is so many different ways to cook the veggies and fruit. The sweet potatoes & squash I steamed in a steamer that my mil gave us for Christmas last year, the peaches I baked, and the pears I chopped and tried to do a quick steam (were you basically boil them in a very small amount of water and that was a total bust!) . I wanted to try every way I could cook everything too see what worked the best for me.

Here's my thought:

Sweet potatoes, you really need one and a half. The three large ones I used made 48 oz of baby food. With Holden only eating 2 oz 3 times a day, we'll be set on sweet potatoes for a while! Also I had to water it down a bit and didn't think about that until after I threw the water out!

Pears will so be baked next time. It was really hard and pointless to do it that way! I had to cut of a bit of each pear because I burnt them. Which does not smell nice at all! Totally digesting.

Peaches are the easiest by far. You just cut the in half remove the pits and lay open side down on a baking dish with an inch of water and bake at 400 degrees until the skin starts to crinkle. I didn't really know what I was looking for so I think I left them in the oven for too long but, the were still yummy. Plus to get them out of the skin all you have to do is take a large spoon and just spoon it out!

The squash was little tricky. I chopped them up pretty small before I steamed them (which is what the directions called for) but I didn't like it. I wanted to cook the squash and the sweet potatoes in there skins to keep as much of the vitamins in them as I could.
So just think of soft little pieces of squash and fighting to get the skins off. Once again the spoon worked. Next time I'm just going to cut them in half and steam them face up, then spoon out the insides.

The chicken I cut away the fat and any chew parts and boiled it. I used some of the water from the chicken to water down the puree a bit. It was very thick!

I like a chopper better than the blender. The website I got everything from said that you can use a blender but I didn't like it at all! But my chopper is way too small so I'm going to have to get a bigger one.
I really want to get a Beaba, it steams and chops in one. That way I wont have to use every pot and pan in my kitchen!
But it was so worth it!

We have 48 oz of sweet potatoes, 14 oz of chicken, squash, and pears, and 12 oz of peaches.
(we had 14 oz of peaches, but I ate 2 shhh!)

Over all it was pretty fun, and I feel so accomplished! I can't wait until tomorrow and see how Holden likes it all!

Here's a great link with how to's and recipes:
www.wholesomebabyfood.com



*remember to start feeding around 4-6 months and take your pediatricians advice on it. We had to start Holden at three months which is very rare.*