Baby Mush

With the promise of snow Wednesday night and Thursday morning, we headed out yesterday to prepare to be snowed in. For me this meant buying a bunch of fruit and vegetables. The lady in the checkout line was pretty confused when I came through with squash, peas, carrots, beans, sweet potatoes, apples, bananas, pears.... and a gallon of chocolate milk. If you knew Matthew you would understand the chocolate milk. He is addicted. It's kiddy cocaine. However, when things are going less than smoothly, chocolate milk can be the ultimate fix. When he is screaming because he doesn't want to leave the library, chocolate milk will get him out calmly. When he gets in trouble for pinching, screaming, hitting, or many of the other things he does, and is really upset... chocolate milk helps his ego.

So with our supplied to last through the snow, today was veggie mashing day. The amount one needs to cook or steam veggies to make them babyfood is a lot more than I expected. It takes a lot of time, and I'm glad I set aside a day to do it. Now we can get a store of fresh babyfood for a couple weeks. So far I've made mashed peas, carrots, green beans, and sweet potatoes. I've done a lot of reading over the past few weeks. Because there is actually more to babyfood than cooking and mashing it. First it requires all the right materials.

Steamer: to steam the veggies, for cooking them, boiling them, microwaving them etc will make them loose a lot of their vitamins.
Food Processor: Something to cut and puree the baby food til it is nice and smooth. We are fortunate to have both a food processor and a magic bullet. The magic bullet seems to work better to get the really smooth texture, but the food processor does ok for things that are kind of naturally smooth like sweet potatoes.

Food Mill: This isn't something a lot of people had, and you can argue whether it is necessary or not. There is the option to throw the steamed peas right in the food processor, and in the end you will end up with mashed peas. However a food mill will give you all the goodness of the peas without the skins. There are a lot of things young babies can not digest, and skins of many vegetables is one of them. A food mill will also keep seeds and other course parts from not entering in the babyfood. It takes some work, but makes you feel good in the end that you are making the best baby food possible :)

I was sad to find out that no matter what you do, green beans are just not quite as creamy as you would hope for a first baby food. So we will save them for a little later.

So far today my baby food making experience has been a good one. Now if only we can get Ian to eat the food a little better :) His worst habit lately is that he will stick his hand in his mouth, and then rub his eyes. That usually is about the end of the baby food for that day, for a crying, screaming baby is not an easy one to feed. Let me know if you have any suggestions to keep his hands out of his mouth!