How to Make Your Own Baby Food

Baby food.  The thought of it just brings to mind watered-down, flavorless purées in tiny glass jars lining the shelves at my local grocery store.  Personally, I think spending money on something so simple should be a crime.  Not to mention, we have no idea what's actually in those jars, such as water toxins and pesticides.  If you're lucky enough to find organic baby food at the grocery store, you can count on spending around $0.99 per jar.  That can get expensive fast!  So, I resolved to make my own baby food before Little Miss Charlotte even entered the world.  I thought it would be time-consuming, but I knew I had to do what was best for my baby.  Once she actually started eating solids, I quickly realized that I had been misled.  It's not time-consuming at all!  I make all of Charlotte's food for the week on Sunday afternoon in about one hour.  

At first, I wasn't sure what to feed her.  Of course, packaged garbage and animal products were out of the question.  But where to begin?  So many people, doctors included, recommend rice cereal to start, however, there's really no nutrient value to rice cereal.  It's empty carbohydrate calories.  I knew I didn't want to start my baby with something like that.  From all of my reading, I realized that the best thing to start her with would be healthy fats.  Babies need lots of healthy fat to grow a big, beautiful brain (one that my daughter will need when she becomes a physicist someday).  One of the best foods for healthy fat is avocado.  It's easily digested, filling, and contains some pretty awesome stuff, such as protein (perfect for a growing kid), vitamins A, C, and E, selenium, zinc, phytosterols, and omega-3 fatty acids.  A better choice than plain-ole rice cereal?  I'd say so.  And I think Charlotte would agree: 

What I would like to suggest is that we moms think outside the box, literally.  It's so quick and easy to grab pre-made baby food, but it's not what's healthiest.  And we want to grow the next generation better than ours, right?  I mean, we're looking at childhood obesity and diabetes rates that are growing every year.  It's so sad.  I know I don't want my daughter to fall into the sugar trap, and when we start babies eating simple, white carbs first thing, we aren't doing them any favors when it comes to resisting that frosted cupcake later in life.  The funny thing is that kids don't know any different.  So far, in addition to avocado, Charlotte has had broccoli, cauliflower, green beans, peas, carrots, sweet potato, tomato, apple, blueberries, strawberries, banana, quinoa, and lentils (with onion!).  And you know what?  She's enjoyed it all!  She will eat anything I give her with gusto.  We tend to push our own food preferences on our kids, but they're actually clean slates.  If we can start now with feeding our children only healthy foods, their taste buds will develop a preference for those foods.  Imagine, no fighting over Happy Meals.  What if your child didn't even know what McDonald's served?  Oh, what a glorious thought!  

And on that note, here's what Charlotte is having this week:

 

First off, I buy everything I can organic if my little girl is going to be eating it.  She's going to have plenty of time to be exposed to pesticides and toxins in her life, but for now, I'm doing my best to minimize them.  I steam most of her veggies to retain as many nutrients as possible, since some vitamins are lost in cooking water.  On Sunday evening, I roughly chopped a large sweet potato and some carrots.  We're working with finger foods now that she's got some dexterity and a couple of teeth, so I try to chop the pieces small enough for her to handle and not choke.  

I steamed those separately until they were soft enough to mash with the back of a spoon.  Then, I poured them onto a cookie sheet to cool. 

Next, I boiled a bag of organic cut green beans. 

Once the beans were soft, I put away the carrots and sweet potatoes and poured them onto the cookie sheet to cool.  After cooling, I used my large knife to chop them into smaller pieces, for Charlotte's little hands to grab.  

I also cooked about one cup of red lentils with a dash of sea salt and mixed them with some leftover quinoa I had made earlier in the day.  With that, a week's worth of nutritious lunches were complete and ready for Grandma to serve.  

Along with these foods, she will eat fruit in the mornings, such as apples, berries, or bananas.  She's not a big eater in the morning and prefers to just nurse at night, but if she wants to eat something at dinner time, I will just steam peas or share my dinner, assuming I'm not eating anything a ten-month-old shouldn't have.  

Making baby food doesn't have to be complicated.  If your little one is still too little for finger foods, just purée the above foods with a little water or breast milk to thin it.  It took less than one hour start to finish for all of this and probably cost $5-$6.  You can't put a price tag on growing healthy babies, but I'd say that's a pretty nice one.