Home-made Baby Food

Best Website Ever (already mentioned, but I felt I needed to second that advice):

www.wholesomebabyfood.com

It will tell you exactly when to introduce certain fruits and veggies, and exactly how to prepare them. Usually, you can steam anything (fruit or veggie) and puree in a food processor. Investing in a good food processor (I have a great one - Black and Decker - from Target) is the first step to quick and easy baby food making. You really don't need to follow complicated recipes, since you can just steam up any fruit or veggie of choice, puree it, put it in an ice cube tray, cover with plastic wrap, and freeze. Once it's frozen, pop it out, put it in a labeled freezer bag, and you've got a wealth of cubes. You can then heat up your cubes in the micro and mix them with other cubes to make different flavors. Although some people have said differently, I don't think you really need to invest in those expensive baby food cube trays for the freezer - an ice cube tray has always worked fine for me. Also, according to the website above, it is perfectly fine to use frozen food to make baby food - you can steam, puree, and refreeze just like fresh produce. This is helpful, as you might not be able to find all that you want fresh (especially if you are going organic).

The funny thing about jarred verses homemade baby food is the taste! If you taste peas from a jar compared with your own pureed peas, you won't believe the difference. Jarred baby food has almost no taste, since it has to be cooked to death in order to can it properly. When you make your own, you only steam for a little while, and all the nutrients are retained! It's quick, it's easy, and it's SO worth it!

Good luck.

Hi - Go out and get the book Super Baby Food -- it is the best resource for making baby food and even had charts that tell you which months to start which foods and how to prepare them.

I will tell you the author is a vegetarian and some of her advice was a bit much for me -- we are not vegetarians and I am not planning to make playdough out of dryer lint -- but this is an awesome book and a very through resource!

Kim

So many great ideas here! I'd just like to add that my Magic Bullet, which I bought for smoothies & such, works GREAT for baby food, and is so small and compact on the counter. It's really easy to just throw in the veggies that I've cooked for dinner and chop 'em up without any fuss.

I've made baby food for both my boys and its super simple, economical, and much healthier than store bought baby food.

www.wholesomebabyfood.com is a free website with all thei nformation you need. :) If you have any questions, feel free to send me a message!

Hi S., I do not know any brand names but again I am recommending a wonderful book called "What To Expect In the First Year." It has a whole section and recommendations on making homemade baby food. Plus a section in the back with guildelines according to age on foods with recipes. It is filled with other advice also. Our boys and I lived by this book. Your local library could get it for you. I have passed my on to two mothers now. Way to go for taking on this adventure. AnitaJ.

Super Baby Food is a good resource. Like Jamie mentioned, the author is a little extreme on some things, but overall it has a lot of information about how to prepare and store homemade baby food.

Making your own food is actually pretty easy, especially when you're just introducing one fruit or veggie at a time. Just puree it in a food processor or blender until smooth and voila! Baby food. I often made a large batch of something at once and froze it using ice cube trays. Once it was frozen, I put the cubes into a freezer bag (so I didn't have 100 trays in the freezer) and then thawed as many cubes as I needed for meals.

I kept jarred food on hand for "emergencies" and convenience and like the Earth's Best brand. I found it cheapest in the 12-packs at Babies R Us.

You can steam and blend just about anything! Check this book out. It Is wonderful and FULL of information and ideas:

Super Baby Food by Ruth Yaron

I tried making my own baby food but my son only liked the fruit. For everything else, I bought Del Monte baby food in the jars. It is less expensive and must taste better than Gerber (he would spit the Gerber food out every time).

Hi, I was aldo going to make my own babyfood but when I started researching it there was certain foods that I couldn;t use because of nitrate levels. And most of them were like carrots, I would have to look at my book to get the rest of the veggies. and also homemade baby food spoils a lot faster. The food that you buy at the store comes in sterile bacteria free containers. So if you want to know the other foods let me know or I can also let you know the name of the book. P.S. My son is 10 months old and I fed him a mixture of homemade and storebought.

The book Baby Bargains by Denise and Alan Fields has a section that rates baby food. They give both Nature's Goodness (available at Cub Foods) and Earth's Best (also at Cub in the organic section or at Byerly's) an A rating whereas they give Gerber's a C. Earth's Best is organic, and that's what I bought for my 5 month old. She loved the sweet potatoes, but hated the peas. We haven't tried anything else yet. Interestingly enough, I bought the Gerber's organic peas just to try something else, and she gobbled them right up (I've read the canning process Gerber uses changes the taste of their peas slightly).

I made almost all of my son's food fresh, just take the fruits or vegetables and cube them up, just boil an inch or so (just enough to steam the food, you don't want to cook out the nutrients) let them go until they are tender, then put them in the blender with the little bit of cooking water. I always poured it into ice cube trays and then separated them into baggies with the date and what it was. When it was feeding time you just take out 2 cubes and microwave them! You can have fun by taking a carrot cube and an apple cube and mixing them together. I had a baby food cookbook that was very helpful. Good Luck!

I've been trying to make my own food-since I'm not real good in the kitchen, this has been interesting. Make sure that you cook the food long enough to be soft and easily blended. I had some pretty big chunks in my carrots because they didn't get cooked well enough...I just did some peas using the frozen steam fresh veggies. I can just steam them right in the bag! Easiest for me since I don't have a steamer and they recommend steaming food to retain nutrients-not sure if doing it this way is really any better since I'm using the microwave, but at least I know the food was cooked. My next challenge is getting the peas out of the ice cube trays! I read somewhere that you should actually spray them with a little non-stick spray so they come out easily, but I didn't think about this until after the cubes were frozen! So, we'll see what happens. It's always an adventure! I've actually been keeping some premade stuff on hand just in case my foray into food making goes awry (kinda like the carrots!). The wholesome food website is great! I actually found a bunch of books at the library that cover this subject. There are a ton of them out there. Once you see the "recipes" you'll realize it's not quite as complicated as it seems. It's just turning out to be trial and error for me.

YEAH!! I made my own baby food and I'm so thankful I did!! My daughter started eating table food when she was just under 8 months old, because I was able to control the texture of her food! I also knew exactly what she was eating!

It's a lot of information, but I wish someone would have given me this info when I first started!!

When I first started out I was very picky!! I steamed everything in a steamer or boiled it in a pan... but then it got stressful...

I used the internet to find out how to cook some of the foods that I personally don't eat but I wanted my daughter to get the nutrition!

Hint: use the steamer bags from Ziplock! They're great!!

Also, you can used the canned veggies and fruits... for the veggies make sure there is no salt added (just the veggie in water) Also- pumpkin!! My daughter loved it- we ended up buying it in a can after pumpkins were out of season and she loved them equally! Fruits make sure they're in pear juice... so sugar (most will say Sugar Free).

PEAS! I had a hard time making the right consistancy with the frozen peas so I always used the canned peas!

As far as containers... buy extra ice cube trays... you can put the food in there and freeze them. When they are frozen pop them out and throw them in a ziplock and back into the freezer! I made so much food- I have enough for the second one on the way since my daughter eats table foods now!

Good luck... hope this gets you started!!

I made most of my baby food a couple months before he was born. This was because it was summer and farmers markets were great places to get food. I took one weekend and that was all I did that weekend. I also bought frozen bags of veggies. I put a little water in the pan and cooked them just until they were a little soft. I took them out and put them threw the blender. Some veggies I needed to add a little water to so they weren't thick. I used the water out of the veggies I had boiled in. I poured the veggies into ice cube trays and froze them. When they were frozen I put them into the bags that you freeze breast in. I labeled and dated them. Then I could just pull them out as needed. You can get a lot of great babyfood recipies if you google homemade baby food. As he got older I took out table food and just put it threw the food grinder. The only challenge I found was that if we were out and about shopping or what not it was easier to have jars of foods. So for those occasions I used beechnut brand. It's a little harder to find but my son prefered it over the Gerber.

I recommend the book "First Meals" by Annabel Karmel. It has many recipes from introducing foods to toddler meals. It also has a section about preparing baby food, storing and tools to use.

I used baby cubes, which you can get at onestepahead.com I preferred this to the ice cube trays then freezer bags. Mostly because I could easily transport one serving of food. Good for you for making your own food, it is really very simple and cost effective. I also would only use fresh food never frozen.

One more thing-I also used the super baby food book. I also found a book called The Big Book of recipes for baby's toddlers and children. It has great recipes as your child grows, I'm just not that creative when it comes to cooking and my 2 yr old is very picky.

I would just buy a big squash or other veggie from my neighbors farm market and cook it up and then use my hand wand blender to puree it all up. Then I put it in 16 oz tupperware containers and froze it. I would just take one out every couple of days and put it in the fridge and they'd eat off of it for a couple of days and then we'd take out another. No need to bother with the ice cube trays and things like that.
It was amazing because one giant squash would feed one of them for 2-4 weeks and I paid 50 cents for it! Talk about cheap baby food.
If I were you I'd look at the supermarket for organic veggies and start there. Carrots also work great.
Good luck,
J.
Mom to 4 and soon one more through another adoption.

Cook the veggies, puree in food processor, then pour into ice cube trays and freeze. The portions will be easy access. Or with my 2nd I have been using Happy Baby organics. You find it in the freezer section with other organic foods, it has also been portioned in trays. It is much easier to take on the go and is much better than the jar foods.

S.,
I found the book "Super Baby Foods" to be extremely helpful when making my own baby food. Take a few things with a grain of salt, she can get a bit "all natural" on you. I used it as a reference for what to feed when, how to store the foods, and how long the foods lasted in the freezer. Making your own food is super easy and WAY CHEAPER!! I made all my own food and when we had to buy jarred food because we were out of town, my daughter wouldn't eat it!

Homemade baby food is easy. Just steam whatever it is you want to make like carrots, puree them and freeze them in ice cube trays. Pop them out and put in baggie for more perm. freezing. Put in a microwave proof dish and microwave for about 20-30 sec. You can also search the webs for recipes like one recipe i had was mixing in some onions with the carrots for variety. Hope this helps

Hi S. and Anders,
I have a 7 month old and have been buying the Del Monte baby food (which I have found doesn't have the sugar and salt Geber does)- just to try to make sure my son will eat it. Then I make my own. I have only done fruits so far (apples, pears and bananas) but am hoping to make peas and sweet potatoes this weekend. The best piece of equiptment I have is a Turbo Chopper Express, which I bought on the Home Shopping Network for about $30. This works fabulous, way better than a blender or food processor, neither of which I have found to be really good at mashing up everything to a baby food consistancy. After I get the food cooked and nice and soft, I put it in the Turbo Chopper Express and poor into ice cube trays (make sure you have the easy release kind). Cover and freeze overnight then transfer to ziploc type bags, marked with whats inside and the date. This allows you to grab just as much as you need. This has worked out great for us. Hope this information helps!

I did this with my son and will with my daughter when she's a little older.

The simplest way is to cook some more veggies when you are cooking dinner each night. Take yours out earlier and leave the extra veg to cook until soft (save some of the water). then you can mash, blend or use a food processor adding water (from veg with all the nutrients,or formula or breast milk) to make quite smooth. I then filled up icecube trays and then moved them to ziplock bags as I'd make a differnt veg or two the next day.

When baby eats more you can pop out an icecube or two and defrost. I found I was able to do this with roast meats eventually as well.

I use to put my veggies after I steamed them in a blender and then put them in an ice cube tray and freeze them. The one cube is usually enough and when they are frozen they can be put in a zip-lock bag.

Hi S.,

I know you've already received a TON of responses, but thought I'd throw in my two cents. :)

I have been using the "So Easy Baby Food" kit for the last 2 1/2 months since my daughter started eating fruits and veggies and I LOVE it! The name says it all - SO EASY! All you need is a food processor so you can make huge batches of baby food (all the recipes make about 24 servings) and the kit has everything else you need. Sometimes the recipes make a little more than 24 cubes (the kit comes w/ 2 trays that hold 12 servings each), so I just use regular ice cube trays for any leftovers and cover it w/ seran wrap.

Just make a new recipe every week and before you know it, you have a huge variety of fruits & veggies. My daughter loves when I combine two cubes (such as apple & pear or broccoli & cauliflower) to make new flavors.

http://www.amazon.com/So-Easy-Baby-Food-Kit/dp/B0007DHMI8...

Hi There,

Oh I am so excited for anyone who is willing tomake their own baby foods. It is so easy it will suprise you. Not only is it inexpensive, it also eases your mind. I made all my food for first daughter and will do so for my now second daughter. foods that are easy to make are sweet potatoes, potatoes, squash, carrots, apricots, apple sauce, pear sauce, ect. the veggies are really easy to make. Just bake them in the oven until tender, remove the skins (if any...bake with the skins on. they are loaded with vits and nutrients), place in a food processor and process. easy as that! I usually make a batch of several kinds to last me thru the week.

good luck!