homemade baby food: the basics

as i mentioned last week, we started gibson on rice cereal and we have had great success in introducing some more new foods since then.

 aside from the store-bought rice cereal, i have begun making food for him to eat instead of buying the commercially made kind at the store.   making baby food is actually quite simple, and i use ruth yaron's super baby food as a guide in how to prep and store the baby food.

so the first post-cereal food we introduced were pears (which he devoured!), followed quickly by applesauce (because i ran out of pears since his big sister ate almost the entire thing), and then a mixture of apples and pears together.

the apple/pear sauce was easy to make.  i used melissa's method to prepare the fruit (about 4 apples and 3 pears peeled and sliced thick), and really, by the time it had sat in the crock pot for a few hours it does just come apart.  i put it through a fine strainer to make sure it was super pureed and that's it (no sweeteners needed).

i used what ruth yaron refers to as the food cube method to store the extra sauce.  any sauce that i wasn't goint to use up within the week i put in ice cube trays (about 3 tsp. in each cube which is equivalent to 1 tbs.).  place plastic wrap over the trays (you can place a piece of wax paper first if you're worried about leeching from the platic wrap into the food) and stick them in the freezer until frozen.  once frozen, pop out each cube out and store them in a labeled and dated gallon size bag or container (i prefer bag because it takes up less space in my freezer).  all i have to do now is take out what i need for the next few days and de-frost in the fridge.  the sauce should keep quite well in the freezer (per ruth yaron about 6 months but i don't plan on keeping it for that long).

some exceptions to this method are bananas and avocadoes, which are easy to just mash up with a fork and serve.  i tried both with gibson.  the banana was a hit (sadly...i'm sure you know my aversion to bananas), but the avocado was not.  i think i didn't allow the avocado to ripen long enough so there was still too much texture even after i mashed it up.  we'll try again in a few days!