Operation: Hide The Banana

It's no secret that Scout HATES banana. She hates it mashed and she hates it puréed. She hates it mixed with rice, oats, peaches, sweet potatoes, and mangos. The only time she actually ate it was the one time I drowned it in breastmilk, and even then she wasn't a huge fan. Despite this, I seem to have some strange impression that all babies should love bananas and so I have taken it upon myself to get Scout to eat bananas, even if I have to be sneaky about it. Thus begins "Operation: Hide The Banana". I will always be able to tell if she tastes it because she gives me this look that I like to refer to as Banana Face. She wrinkles her nose, gives me her best wtf eyebrows, and holds out her arms with her hands in front of her face as if to say "Stop mom, you're not fooling anyone!".

Stay tuned to find out if I am successful in my attempts. I highly doubt I will be, but it will be fun to try!

Mango

Wow, well mango definitely wins the prize for the most annoying food to prepare! It has the most awkwardly shaped pit I have ever seen in my life and it was almost impossible to predict where to cut the fruit in order to avoid it. It easily took me over an hour to pit, chop and peel 6 mangos. In the same breath though, they were definitely one of the most delicious foods to snack on while preparing!

I bought 6 mangos on sale for 2 for $3 (that's a total of $9 for the mathematically challenged), and it made 42 1 ounce servings. That's almost 10 jars of baby food! Scout really liked it too, and it's a good thing because I now have a freezer full of it!

Avocado

I was so excited when I walked into the grocery store today and saw avocados on sale at 3 for $5. I had been wanting to give Scout avocado for a while, but it is just so darn expensive and I have been trying to stick with the more "economically efficient" foods. I snatched 3 up at that price and rushed home. I have a secret crush on avocado myself, so I couldn't wait for her to try it!

Avocado, like banana, is one of those no-cook foods; you just scoop it and mash it with a fork. It looked so fresh and creamy!

She hated it. She seriously gagged. I tried puréeing it thinking that it was too chunky, and she still hated it. I tried adding some water thinking that maybe it was too rich, and she still hated it. Now I'm stuck with 2 1/2 avocados sitting in my fridge. Secret crush or not, I have no idea what I'm going to do with them now...

Zucchini

I had some serious reservations about making zucchini for Scout. I personally love the stuff. It's one of my favourite vegetables, but it tends to turn to mush when it's cooked and I thought it might be a really gross texture once it was puréed. Well, I'm happy to report that I was WRONG! It had such a smooth texture and was a beautiful yellow-green colour that was a little bit unexpected. Scout absolutely loved it. It is definitely her favourite so far. She couldn't stop smiling and laughing the entire time she was eating it!

The zucchini was so easy to make too. It took nothing to peel it, chop it, and pop it in the microwave. I only bought 2 small zucchinis because I didn't want to really commit to it until I knew how it was going to turn out, but it still made 7 1 ounce servings, which is about equal to one and a half jars of baby food.

Peach / Banana Medley

This morning was a bit of a breakfast experiment. I had peaches frozen in the freezer and fresh bananas sitting on the counter, so I decided to mix them together. As I'm mixing, I'm thinking to myself "I am a genius! Alone, I have to thicken the peaches and thin out the bananas. Mixing them together makes so much sense! I am AWESOME!".

Then it was time to feed Scout. I could tell from the start that she wasn't really a fan. She reluctantly took a few more bites, then decided to stop humouring me completely. Leave it to the 7 month old to knock me down a few notches..

Apple / Sweet Potato Medley

Tonight I decided to try one of the combinations suggested in my book. Since I had both apples and sweet potatos in the freezer and she had already tried and seemed to do well on both, I decided to try that one. I think she really liked it. The apple seemed to cut the starchiness of the sweet potato and the sweet potato cut the sourness of the apple, so it worked out well. It also doesn't get much easier than microwave and stir!

Ugh, stupid grains!

It's official, making my own baby food has turned me into a control freak! When I was at the grocery store the other day I took a wonder down the baby food aisle because I thought it was time for Scout to try out a new grain. I wanted to buy her some oats that you prepare by mixing in breastmilk. So down the aisle I go, a little bitter to begin with that I can't make my own vitamin enriched grains. When I reach the baby cereals I see "just add water" rice, "just add water" oats, "just add water" barley, and "just add water" wheat, but not a single "just add breastmilk" ANYTHING in the entire aisle! It infuriated me to think that someone would go to the store looking for something to be prepared with breastmilk, not see anything, and buy the "just add water" one instead, thinking that it's pretty much the same thing. Now, I'm no nutritionist, but I have been lactose intolerant most of my life and know first hand that "modified milk ingredients" translates into powdered cows milk. I also know that babies aren't supposed to have cows milk until they are at least a year old because there is a risk of allergy. Needless to say, I walked out of the store without baby cereal. This whole experience made me realize how important it is for me to control what goes into my baby's mouth (well, in terms of food anyway...). Whether parents decide to make their own baby food or not, reading lables and knowing what the ingredients actually mean is very important and nobody should settle for something less than what they were looking for just because the store doesn't have it. There will always be another store around the corner!

Peaches

I'm not going to lie, making peaches kind of sucked. They're slimy, messy, and not exactly easy to pit or peel. Once they were cooked and puréed they were really runny, more like the consistency of soup than baby food. In hindsight, they were probably over ripe when I bought them (which is probably why they were on sale) even though I selected ones that were firm to the touch. I solved this problem by simply adding a couple of spoonfuls of rice cereal after I warmed up the serving she was about to eat, just to thicken it a little bit.

Five large peaches made 21 1 ounce servings. And let's be honest, peaches are fun. Not only did Scout love the taste, but it gives me an excuse to relive my childhood by belting out a little Presidents of the United States of America while I feed her!

Pears

There are 2 varieties of pears that are suggested for making baby food; anjou and bartlett. Bartlett pears were on sale this week, so that was a no brainer. The preparation of the pears was VERY similar to when I made apples, so it almost felt as though I had done it before. Again, I was a little worried that they would turn brown before I could cook them, but I wasn't as neurotic about it as I was before.

Six pears made 21 1 ounce servings for my freezer stash. I think Scout liked the pears better than apples because they weren't as sour, or at least her face indicated that they weren't. :)

Sweet Potato

Yesterday I made Scout sweet potatos. It was easy enough; peel, chop, nuke, and mash. One thing I noticed though is that they came out VERY thick and starchy. I ended up adding more water than the recipe called for in an attempt to thin them out, but I still think Scout had a hard time digesting them because she did NOT have a good night last night! In the future I'm going to add breastmilk to try to thin it out even more. I also have to be a stickler and keep trying to get her to drink water while she is eating, which seems to be an impossible task at the moment because the girl just does not understand the concept of a sippy cup.

One sweet potato made 14 1 ounce servings. I think it's almost time for us to invest in a bigger freezer...

Apples

My biggest worry when I started making apples was how on earth I was going to peel and cut up 6 apples fast enough so that they didn't turn brown before I had a chance to cook them. I know I could have gone the lemon juice route, but I didn't really feel comfortable doing that because I didn't know how Scout's tummy would react to something so acidic. Surprisingly enough, they didn't even START to turn brown by the time I was done, despite the fact that I'm a total clutz with a knife and it took me forever! I think the reason for this may be the variety of apples I was using. My baby food bible said to use either golden delicious (apparently this variety causes less gas in babies, which is always a good thing) or a combination of golden delicious and granny smith, which would obviously more tart. Again, because I am a total wuss, I opted for just golden delicious.

Six apples made 35 1 ounce servings, which is not too shabby. Scout seemed to like them. She made a little bit of a sour face, but she ate them all, so it couldn't have been too bad!

Peas

I'm sold on this whole making my own baby food thing. Have you ever seen a jar of peas in the baby food section of the grocery store? Newsflash, they are not supposed to be that colour. I made peas for Scout today and they were actually green! Not brownish-green or olive green or baby poop green, but a bright, fresh, healthy looking green! It's a freaking modern day miracle! From here on out, every time I think about complaining about making food, I'm going to say to myself "Remember the colour of the peas?"

As an added benefit, 1 bag of frozen peas cost me only $1.99 and made 28 1 ounce servings and took less than 10 minutes of my time. I'm struggling to find a reason NOT to make my own baby food at this point.

Banana - Take 2

Okay, I think the problem yesterday was a texture thing. Let's face it, mashed banana can be kind of, well, slimy. So we decided to give it another shot today, only this time I mixed in some breastmilk to thin it out. It was a success; she ate it all!

Banana

It doesn't get much easier than banana, or so I thought. Step 1, peel banana; step 2, mash banana with fork; step 3, feed banana to baby. The end, right?? Wrong. Step 4, clean up banana that was immediately spit out by baby; step 5, continue to mash banana with fork; step 6, feed banana to baby; step 7, repeat step 4; step 8, give up on fork, get out hand blender, and buzz the hell out of banana; step 9, repeat steps 3 and 4; step 10, give up.

Despite being a monkey, Scout apparently does NOT like bananas.

Butternut Squash

Okay, first off all let me say that I'm glad I started with squash. Everything has to seem easier after that, right? The fact that I managed to keep all my fingers after trying to cut through that sucker is a success in and of itself! Peeling the skin off of it wasn't exactly a walk in the park either. Needless to say, I did it and I survived and it really wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be.

I guess I should say at this point that I'm a direction follower and not really the "winging it" type, so I've enlisted "So Easy Baby Food" by Joan Ahlers and Cheryl Tallman as my baby food bible. I'm not going to blog about it a la Julie and Julia, but it does seem to be a pretty good reference. It suggests what foods to introduce when and gives suggestions regarding flavour variations to add and foods to combine with each other. In the book, all of the foods are prepared in the microwave, so the recipes are super fast and easy. I'll admit, at first I was turned off by the idea of preparing my baby's food in the microwave, radiation poisoning and such, but as it turns out, the food actually retains more nutrients that way because it uses less water.

Anyhoo, 1 butternut squash prepared 14 1 ounce servings, which is way cheaper than buying it in jars, and Scout absolutely loved it! She even cried when it was all gone.

Time to stop procrastinating...

Okay, I'll admit it, I've been putting off beginning to make my own baby food.  To tell the truth, I'm a little intimidated.  I'm not exactly a wiz in the kitchen, and making my own food was a big part of our financial survival when it came to having a baby on my mat leave salary.  If it turns out I can't do it, well, nobody likes to admit defeat.

The fact is, Scout's been on rice cereal now for about a week and she seems to be doing well, so it's time to move on to bigger and better things.  Let the adventures in baby food begin!