It happened to me again tonight. Another mother said I was amazing and that she could never do what I do.
First of all, that’s crap.
Second, she is a great mother. She gives so freely of her heart to both the children she gave life to and those who came to her through marriage, even when her love is not returned, even rejected. I admire that about her a lot.
Our families were having dinner together tonight, and she was admiring my refrigerator (Yes, I know how lame that sounds, but whatever, I like my fridge.). She opened my freezer and noticed the ice cube trays were filled with something orange. When I told her it was baby food for Thor, she looked at me with a look of a combination of amazement, bewilderment, and shame. She told me she didn’t know how to do that, and her kids had never been able to have homemade baby food. When I told her it wasn’t hard at all to do, it was obviously she didn’t believe me and the conversation moved on.
But even now, I’m bothered by her disappointment in herself. Ladies, it really isn’t that hard to make homemade baby food, I’ll show you. Before I do, I want you to remember something. If you do not make your own, and you buy whatever you can from Wal-Mart, that doesn’t make you a second-class mom. Moms have been buying store bought food for decades and you know what? Their kids are now happy, healthy, contributing members of society too. So, there will be no self-mom-shame about this. Okay?
Here is what you need:
- A pot with a lid OR a steamer of some kind
- A blender OR food processor
- Ice cube trays
- Desired vegetables
Today, I am making sweet potatoes and green beans.
NOTE: Look, my green beans are both non-organic and frozen, and I’m sure organic and fresh would be better, but that’s not where I’m at in life right now.
Wash the sweet potatoes, set your oven to 350 degrees and spray a 9×13 pan down with some kind of cooking spray.
Next, you need to poke holes in the potatoes then, just put them in the oven.
Now, just leave those in the oven until they are cooked well all the way through (Maybe for an hour. Honestly, it takes more energy/focus than I have to spare to pay that close attention. I just put them in and check on them as I am in and out of my kitchen in the next hour).
Now onto the green beans.
I have a cool steamer that came with my pots, but you can just put the green beans in a pot with some water in the bottom and it does the same thing.
Now, go fold a load of laundry (Come on, you know you have at least one load).
Once the green beans are cooked and soft, you then just toss them in a blender.
For my first kid, I had a very nice name brand food processor. For kids 2, 3, and 4, I had an off brand food processor. The difference? The nice one was a little quieter. That’s it. For “Thor”, my 5th baby, I found a blender at Goodwill for like $6. So hear me when I say you don’t have to have anything special to do this.
There are few things I learned over the years that do help. Depending on the age or sensitivity to texture of your child, you can blend it longer or shorter amounts of time. To get it super smooth and creamy like the kind you buy at the store, add fluid (I use the water from the bottom of the steamer) and blend for longer. When I made it for my “Duchess”, she liked to have some texture and chunks to her green beans. So, I wouldn’t blend it as long with no extra fluid. “Edison”, on the other hand, is very picky about the way his food feels, and if it wasn’t perfectly smooth he would gag and then projectile vomit the entirety of his stomach all over my kitchen…
Parenting is so glamorous.
Ok, once I’ve got the green beans all blended, I pour them into ice cube trays.
The key here is you don’t want to fill them to the top or they will be really hard to get out after they are frozen. Then, stack the trays and put them in the freezer.
Now, back to the sweet potatoes.
You want them to be cool to the touch. I just pick them up, pull the skin off, and then put them into the blender like the green beans. I add some water to the top to help them blend smoothly.
Now, because I only have 3 ice trays, and they are all currently full of green beans, I put the blended sweet potatoes in a ZipLock bag in the fridge until the beans are done. The ZipLock bags are convenient because you can just cut a corner off and fill the ice cube trays with no mess.
I store the baby food in a bag in my freezer, and just microwave 1 or 2 cubes at a time for my boy.
See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?
