Baby Food Wars III - New foods and Pureeing fun

In the world of homemade baby food there are tons of handy gadgets aimed at not only encouraging you to make your own food but also try to make it easier. Things like the baby cook which steams and then purees all in one container are great.... I don't have any of those. I have an oaster blender with a baby food setting and an electric steamer for cooking. I do ok usually though and making my own food is not only fairly easy but also rewarding as I see the Ziploc bags I baby food piling up in the freezer. Not to mention the fact that it is healthier since I can buy organic if I desire and it is cheaper than pre-made baby food. What more could you want?

Today was fruit day. I was out of peaches and needed to make more since Nicholas eats peaches quite a lot. I decided it might be smart to try and make my food out of a bag of frozen peaches from Walmart. Mistake I guess. For the price I could have gotten several fresh peaches so I thought maybe about the same amount would be in the bag. Nopers. I steamed 'em up and stuck them in the blender and hit the button. When I was done I looked down at the sad looking amount of bright orange goo and wondered if I needed to add more water. That can't be all the puree I'm gonna get out of the things... can it? It was. I poured it into the ice cube tray and it only filled up half. *Sigh* This did not bode well for the container of blueberries in the fridge that were also bagged and frozen and had been steamed the night before. I pureed them and only got 7 oz. Wellllll bummer. It filled up the rest of the tray which was good I guess but hardly worth freezing in a way. He could have easily eaten that amount in a couple of days before it went bad. Oh well I froze it anyway and I now have little peach and blueberry cubes. We offered Nicholas some of the blueberry mix before I froze it and he seemed to like it. I didn't really get to watch him eat it because I was stuck doing dishes and cleaning the kitchen (more on that later) so daddy got roped into feeding baby breakfast which he shovels in as fast as possible so he can go back to playing his computer games lol.

The next thing on the list to puree were the green beans I had also steamed last night. Yay for green beans, Nicholas loves those! Maybe because these were cold already though they didn't blend as nicely as they have in the past. I ended up adding more water that I think I had to add last time and there was still a couple of stubborn beans that insisted on floating around on top of the mix instead of getting pulled down to be pureed. So in true blond moment fashion I pulled off the lid of the blender and poked the swirling mix with a spoon to get the stubborn beans down near the blades. For about five seconds it seemed like that was going to work out for me and then the green bean mixture blew up in my face. I ducked, sort of and ended up with green sludge in my hair, on my face, my shirt, the counter, cabinets, wall.... you get the idea. Uh oh... that's not good! I said a couple of less than mommy approved words and shut the blender off. To my horror the same couple of green beans were STILL floating around on the top refusing to be pureed. I picked them out and fed them to the dog. Thank goodness for two standard poodles who will eat anything. After I finished cleaning green gremlin goo off the wall I poured the chunky puree into it's own ice cube tray and stuck both trays in the freezer. Will take them out in the morning and put the little cubes into bags and start the process over again with a different kind of food. I have a ton of new foods to get made up!

Speaking of new foods, did I mention Nicholas had blueberries today. I read up on blueberries and found that they are not related to strawberries and are relatively low on the allergen scale. So I went ahead and decided to try some. Nicholas seemed to like them and ate them up for his daddy with no problem. The one problem with blueberries is that blueberry juice (the leftover cooking liquid) stains. As in can stain everything. It took me forever to get little blue spots off my counter top after a couple of drips of the juice spilled. It would certainly make a good dye. Other new foods I have in the kitchen and ready to try include pumpkin, kiwi, pears, parsnips, corn, mango and apples. I can't wait to see what he thinks of some of the new fruits and pumpkin. I really hope he likes them and they don't cause any digestive messes. In cloth diapers cleaning those off is never fun :P Plus as messy as making baby food obviously can be extra poo is not a bright spot in the day lol.

Cheers! Happy Feeding!!