You're Making What??

This past weekend Andrew began eating solid foods.  His little bottles of milk just wasn't cutting it anymore.  When we started talking about feeding him solids, I thought about trying to make my own baby food.   (I know you are all laughing hysterically, and I'm ok with that)  I wasn't sure I could do it because it's just not the type of thing I would normally do, but I've a had a couple of friends, whom I trust, tell me how easy it was, so I thought I'd give it a try.

We started off by going to up to the Dekalb Farmer's Market mainly just to check it out because I had never been, but we found they had great deals on all kinds of fruits and vegetables.  The girls really enjoyed looking at all the breads, cereals, fruits, veggies, etc, but they thought that the seafood was so cool.  They kept asking for Brian to buy some fish for them to eat :-) Oh and a side note that I did not know, if you do ever go, bring a jacket!!! It is FREEZING in there!!!

So after our exciting trip to the Farmer's Market, we headed over to Trader Joe's to pick up some fruit bars for Aubrey who CANNOT get enough of them! I think we bought about 10 boxes!  Plus, we needed to cheer her up after leaving the Farmer's Market without seeing any barns of farmers.  I guess I should have been more specific about what a FARMER'S Market is :-) However, the fruit bars made everything better.

So back to the baby food.  Caroline could not wait to help make Andrew's baby food.  She loves her baby brother beyond words and anything that she can do to help out with him, she is all for!  It was really a two day process because I didn't have enough ice trays to freeze everything I wanted to make so I had to make it in shifts.  Here is a list of the things that we made:

Fruits:
Plums
Peaches
Pears
Cantaloupe
Blueberries

Vegetables:
Broccoli
Sweet Potatoes
Carrots
Avocados

I'm still shocked at how easy it was and how good it turned out.  Andrew especially loves the avocados and the blueberries, which, by the way, is wonderful to get out of clothes :-) Most everything, I added about a 1/2 cup of water and cooked them down.  The others I just pureed and put into ice trays to freeze.  Anyone who is thinking about making their own baby food, I would totally encourage it.  It only took a couple of hours from start to finish, I have enough baby food to last for about three months, and it was much more economical!  Here are some of the pics I took from the day! They are at different times...I should have followed one food the whole way through, but that would have required planning :-)

The food prior to cooking.

Caroline with the blueberries (her favorite)

Adding the blueberries.

Pears simmering. 

Adding carrots.

Cooking the carrots.

Then, we put them in the Ninja :-)

Caroline spooning the carrots into the ice cube trays.

The pears ready for the freezer.  After they are frozen, we put them into labeled zip loc bags with the name and date.