Adventures in Baby Food Making

You may think that I have  finally lost my mind. You may be thinking "she's making baby food for 3 babies!" And, well, yes. Yes I am. And no I'm not crazy. Well, I may be crazy, but this isn't why.

I'm sure you've seen and heard about approximately 1 million people who are making their own baby food. Some of them (most of them really it seems) claim to do this because it's "better" for their baby, they want to feed their baby only organic, they want only the best for their baby. That's great and all. (And I think pretty much every mom wants the best for her baby.) But that's not why I decided to make baby food. I have nothing against baby food in a jar. My boys eat it at school for lunch every day. I decided to make my own baby food because baby food is expensive!!

So I did what every self-respecting 30-something-year-old mom does - I went to Facebook. And like every triplet mom, I asked my triplet mom friends for advice. Then I also asked a friend from high school whom I really trust with stuff like this what she does. And I basically did what she said. Oh, and one of the best pieces of advice she gave me - the Wholesome Baby Food website. This website pretty much tells you everything you need to know about making baby food, including how to make each specific food and the order in which you should feed these foods to your baby. You can check it out here.

Here's the basic process:
1. Buy food - fresh or frozen
2. Cook it somehow if you're going to freeze it
3. Puree in the blender or however you feel like pureeing it
4. Freeze it - I prefer ice cube trays. Each cube is 1 oz. A jar of baby food is 4 oz. So 4 cubes = 1 jar of baby food
5. Pop the baby food ice cubes out and store in a ziplock freezer bag
6. Take out however many cubes you want to feed and either thaw in the fridge or microwave
See, it's easy! I'm not crazy!

So first I made sweet potatoes. It was super easy. I peeled them, diced them, the boiled/steamed (I don't know the difference) until soft, and blended. Then I stuck the pureed sweet potatoes in the little breast milk bottles from the NICU and froze them. It made a lot!

Then I made apples, pears, carrots, squash, peas, and green beans. These were the only foods the boys had tried at that point. The squash didn't turn out right (because I bought the wrong kind of squash) but everything else went great!

Cooking Apples

Peas in the blender

Baby Food Making in Progress

Baby Food Making Round 1 Complete!

Oh and the best part . . . I made all of that during nap time!

Logan approved too!

Mommy's pears are yummy!

I also "make" the boys avocado and bananas. But there's no cooking or preparing ahead on those. I just stick them in my little single serving blender cup, add a little water, and puree.

Since Round 1, I've made pears and carrots a second time and I've made butternut squash. This past weekend I bought a bunch of frozen fruits and veggies plus some fresh organic spinach (organic only matters to me if it's something that I don't peel). I haven't made all of it yet because I mostly bought stuff they haven't tried yet.

I wasn't kidding! I bought a LOT of frozen stuff!

I made the blueberries, mangos, and lima beans the other day. We tried mangos and they LOVE them! I think we'll try lima beans in the next few days. I'm still scared to try blueberries! I made a HUGE mess making them! I may or may not have left the heat too high and the pot may or may not have boiled over and turned everything remotely close to my stovetop blue. But they made my house smell super yummy!

Here are some of the most important baby food making lessons I learned:

It's ok to use frozen fruits/veggies as long as they don't have additives like salt (most frozen fruits/veggies don't but most canned fruits/veggies do)

If you buy frozen fruit and you're going to refreeze it, you have to cook it, even if you wouldn't otherwise cook that particular fruit

You only need to buy organic if you aren't going to peel the fruit/veggie. So, for example, you don't need organic squash but you do want to use organic spinach

When people say "squash" in connection with baby-food-making they mean BIG squash, like butternut or acorn squash, not summer squash (yellow squash). I bought yellow squash the first time and we ended up eating it for dinner ourselves. Once you remove the seeds and the skin there's basically nothing left of a yellow squash. Butternut squash is WAAAYYY better for baby food. And my babies love it.

You don't need the fancy baby food making stuff. I use my regular Ninja blender (it is pretty nice though in my opinion) and I freeze the baby food in regular ice cube trays from Wal-Mart.

Peas are VERY dry so they need lots of water or my babies will refuse to eat them

May babies will eat green stuff but they may need to be tricked into thinking it's something else like carrots or butternut squash

And most importantly, keep it simple! I didn't have enough ice cube trays when I made Round 1 so I froze some baby food in breast milk bottles and breast milk bags (because I had them and it seemed like a good idea). Well the breast milk bags are great for storage but it's hard to get the baby food into an out of the bags. The little bottles are great but it's harder to thaw them quickly. The ice cube trays are the way to go!

Our favorite foods right now:

Butternut squash

Pears

Sweet 

potatoes

Carrots

Yogurt (I get yobaby or just plain full fat Stonyfield yogurt for Mason and Logan and soy for James)

Mangos

And they all like oatmeal again. Yay! 

And here's a few pictures of dinner time at our house:

Before dinner

 And yes that's 5 bowls on the table. 1 bowl of yogurt each (we add calorie powder to Mason's and Logan's yogurt to fatten them up and James gets soy) and a fruit and a veggie to share. The green in the picture is actually avocado and banana and the other shared bowl that night was mango, another fruit. So no veggies that night!

Mason with half his dinner on his face

Oh and to wrap this up, I really enjoy making baby food! I don't make food for the big people in my house often because it's crazy town from the time I get home from work until the babies go to bed then I'm just beat and Brian usually makes dinner! So I get the satisfaction of making someone's food! And Brian helps when needed too!