While you could head to your local grocery store or wholesale outlet and pick up a month’s supply of baby food, chances are you’ll pay far too much for it. Because baby food is an essential part of any baby’s diet, big companies know that they can get away with charging virtually whatever they’d like for the product. If you’d like to get out from underneath the stranglehold of expensive baby food, we have an easy solution for you. Make your own.
Homemade baby food isn’t terribly difficult to make and with a few simple ingredients that you can pick up either online or at your local grocery store, you can make a healthy and nutritious meal for your infant that’s probably better for your child and less damaging to your bank account than regular baby food. Below you will find an easy to follow recipe as well as some other pointers on how you can make your baby food even better.
Homemade baby food isn’t terribly difficult to make and with a few simple ingredients that you can pick up either online or at your local grocery store, you can make a healthy and nutritious meal for your infant that’s probably better for your child and less damaging to your bank account than regular baby food. Below you will find an easy to follow recipe as well as some other pointers on how you can make your baby food even better.
Sweet Potato Puree
Purees are the easiest for small children to digest and they’re extremely easy to make. The following process can be done with almost
any vegetable imaginable, and part of the process can be simplified with the use of a blender for vegetables that you just can’t get mashed up with a fork.
- First of all, you’re going to need to get some sweet potatoes from your local grocer. Sweet potatoes are recommended as a meal because not only do they have a lot of nutrients in them, their sweet taste makes them palatable to young children who are prone to gag at the smell or thought of mushy vegetables.
- With your potato in hand, wash it thoroughly in the sink. Pesticides and bacteria can grow on the potato in the growing process, so scrubbing them off before you cook it is always a good and safe idea.
- Poke your potato with a fork a few times so that moisture has a place to escape from. Not poking the potato a few times with a fork could lead to a potato explosion, and that’s never good!
- With your sweet potato washed and poked, it’s time to put it in the oven. Preheat your oven to about 400 degrees and place the potato on a baking tray so that if any juice leaks out, it won’t spill onto the oven base.
- Bake the potato for 35-45 minutes.
- Once the potato is nice and soft, you can remove it from the oven and cut it in half with a sharp knife.
- With your halved potato, scoop all of the mushy sweet potato from the skin and voila, you have a ready-made mushy potato puree for your infant to eat. You can flavor the potato however you’d like (say seasonings) or just serve it plain to your child.
As said earlier, you can do the same general process with just about any vegetable or vegetable combination. After boiling or cooking the vegetables so that you’ve boiled away any bacteria, you can toss them into a blender and blend them into a puree that’s ready to eat. Things like broccoli don’t boil into a mush like potatoes and other starches, so by boiling them you’re only making sure they’re cooked and ready to blend.
More Ideas
It’s pretty difficult to keep your mind stocked with ideas for what you can feed your baby every day. Considering one sweet potato is
probably enough for three or four meals, chances are you want to diversify things a little bit so your child doesn’t get bored eating the same thing on a daily basis.
A book that we highly recommend is called Top 100 Baby Purees: 100 Quick and Easy Meals for a Healthy and Happy Baby. It’s been highly rated by hundreds of Amazon customers and remains our favorite recommendation for what to give to new mothers looking to make homemade baby food themselves.
In addition to giving valuable advice on what different vegetables and fruits you can feed your child, there is also plenty of information on how you can make the transition from puree food into things like solid food. Also included are tips on how best to freeze any excess food that you make as well as reheat it. And lastly, there are tons of tips on how you can quickly prepare meals that are nutritious and won’t take up hours of your time trying to find the best combination of ingredients for the perfect meal.
Earth’s Best
While making homemade baby food is a lot cheaper than trying to buy all of the food you need for your child at the grocery store, sometimes you may be in a hurry and can’t manage to get a meal put together in time. It’s always a good idea to have some pre-made baby food on hand for those times that you just can’t get a meal put together. We highly recommend a brand called Earth’s Best and their vegetable variety baby food. It’s completely organic and doesn’t contain any added preservatives in the food. Each box comes with 12 cans, meaning that you can buy one or two packs of their food and have it last you quite a while if you’re supplementing only a few meals here and there.