The Domestic Darlin': Making Baby Food

Around Jack's 4 month birthday I started thinking about solid foods for him. He's a big boy with a big appetite and has been drinking 35-42 oz of breast milk per day since he was 16 weeks old. I know there are a lot of varying opinions about when to start solids, but after talking with my pediatrician, I decided to start him on rice cereal once a day when he was 4 months. Now, after a month of doing great with rice cereal, I've decided to go ahead and start introducing other solids. I feel like he's ready and my pediatrician is good with it, so I'm just going for it. Once I made the decision to start him on solids, I went back and forth about whether or not to make his baby food or just buy it. As a working mom, the convenience of buying it was pretty tempting, but in the end, for many reasons, I decided to go ahead and make it myself.

I researched several brands of food processor systems made especially for baby food making, but in the end I decided to go with the Baby Bullet. After reading several reviews and talking with several sales people at Buy Buy Baby, it seemed to be the most "bang for your buck." Today I made sweet potatoes for Jack. It was super easy and even kinda fun. One large sweet potato made 11 servings. From start to finish, including prep work, it took me 30 minutes to make his whole week's worth of food. The one sweet potato cost me about the same amount as one jar of baby food. Maybe with the extra money I save momma can buy a new pair of shoes...I mean...put it in Jack's savings ;-)

The best part of the whole adventure was watching Jack's face as he tasted his new food. At first he smiled and gobbled it up, but after the third bite or so he started gagging. I didn't take it too personally, as I read it's pretty normal for babies to gag when they eat something new because of the foreign taste and texture. Here are the few quick steps it took me to make the sweet potatoes today: