Making Your Own Baby Food

Truth be told, I'm not really doing this anymore in the sense that I'm no longer making purees.  Isabella is doing so well with finger foods that I've decided to use up the purees in my freezer, but not make anymore.  I'm still making Isabella's food, but now we try to feed her what we're eating when possible.  For those times when we're eating something she can't have (too spicy, too hard, too allergenic, etc.) I am cooking and dicing veggies for her.  I can put a couple days worth in the fridge and measure the rest out into 1/4 cup serving sizes to freeze.  I just take the individual servings and put them in snack size Ziploc bags then put all the bags into either a larger freezer bag or a plastic container labeled with the food name, amount per serving, and date.  I just get them out and thaw as needed.  I've done this with veggies, shredded chicken, and pasta.  It is much easier for me to spend a Sunday preparing a large batch of food and freezing for later than it is for me to cook up a little bit for each feeding.  Fruit is a little trickier.  It it is soft enough I'll just dice up fruit and feed it to her, but some things need to be steamed a little to soften them up.  I haven't tried freezing diced fruit, because I'm worried about browning.  I try to buy frozen fruit when I can that way I can take what I need without worrying that anything will go to waste.  I buy a lot of frozen veggies too, that way if I can't get to it right away it will be fine in the freezer, rather than worrying that fresh produce will rot in the fridge.  I'll probably buy more fresh produce when the Farmer's Market opens.

For those of you interested in making your own purees, I'll tell you what I was doing.  I would buy my fruits and veggies and either steam them or bake them depending on what it was.  I would puree most things in my food processor, but green beans and peas pureed more smoothly in the blender.  I would freeze everything in these trays (For the record, I once tried freezing breast milk in these trays, but wasn't happy with the turn out.  I definitely prefer my Lansinoh bags.).  Once frozen, I would pop out the cubes and place them into a labeled freezer bag.  Each evening I tried to remember to take out food for the next day so it could thaw overnight in the fridge, but sometimes I forgot so I would just thaw it in the microwave.  I liked to freeze everything individually and then thaw together to make combinations, but some people mix before freezing, it's just a matter of personal preference. 

By far, my favorite resource was the Wholesomebabyfood.com.  I looked at several books, but I didn't like any of them as much as this website.  You can actually buy a PDF version of the website's information to print off if you like, but it is over 500 pages, so I decided against it.  I would highly recommend this website to anyone looking for information about feeding babies/toddlers.  It has the answer to pretty much every question you'll ever have on the subject.