Baby Purees O'Plenty!

I've been meaning to write about our adventures in homemade baby purees!! Yes, very, very exciting stuff here. For the baby's record though, I gotta write about this, plus, I'm a lil' proud of my efforts, gotta say. Offering nothing but fresh foods has been great for her health and my sense of accomplishment as a mommie.

So yeah, armed with nothing but Annabel Karmel's "Top 100 Baby Purees," I've spent the last 2 months dedicated to making our baby sweet potato's food from scratch, and I gotta say, it's wonderful! The only time she's eaten any store bought baby food is when we've been traveling out of town. Soon though, as her palate expands to include meats and cheese and more mixed food purees, we plan to be toting a baby grinder wherever we go-go.

Here's a list of her first baby food purees, starting with the first and so forth from there on:

1) Apple - the elementary baby food staple, of course
2) Sweet Potato - tastes like dessert, I swear - she loves it, of course.
3) Carrots and Sweet Potato - likes it fine, no big deal.
4) Petite Peas - her first favorite! No, really! Eat it right up, eager for each bite.
5) Pear - another staple mixed with cereal, likes it fine.
6) Broccoli and Peas - surprisingly, she eats it right up! - but results in BAD tummy bubbles, of course!
7) Banana - absolutely HATED it the first time, I mean really, really hated it = She cried!
8) Mango - can't eat it up fast enough, another favorite...
9) soooo we tried Mango with Banana - - but she wasn't a big fan of the mix, no fooling her.
10) Butternut squash - her very favorite to date! Have to admit it tastes really nummy.
11) Apple and Pear with Cinnamon - very tasty as well, like dessert.
12) Tried not-quite-so-ripe banana mashed with a fork = Success! However, it causes a lot of 'red-faced-n'-grunting' constipation, so we've given up on bananas for now...
13) Papaya, now eaten in tandem with the broccoli mix to help her digestion - she loves it!
14) Avocado - likes it fine, but the clothing stains are awful to treat, so it appears only once a week or less.
15) White corn - loves it, but only if warm... absolutely hates it if served cold.
16) Hodgepodge veggies - immediately HATED this mix = produced angry tears! Haven't tried it again since its introduction. [broccoli, carrots, corn, red pepper]
17) Foursome veggies - a total hit, warm or cold [peas, green beans, carrots, and limas]
18) Mango, Blueberries and Raspberries - may be her new favorite! And this may be TMI, but it's easily identifiable in her diaper the following day.
19) And today, while we're stuck at home together, sick, we're about to try the "Easy Pot Chicken" - - her first meat puree! Includes leek, carrots and sweet potato and some chicken broth...

She's gunna be eating better than we do!

About once every two weeks, I have a baby puree making extravaganza during which I might mix up 3-5 different purees while I'm doing some other kind of cleaning or cooking in the kitchen as well. Some food items requiring steaming while others just get thrown in the blender as is. I use silicone muffin pan forms for easy pop-out removal once frozen, and we just store the muffin cup 'disks' in a Ziploc bag in the freezer. The muffin pan also allows more portion size variance than when using an ice cube tray. One batch typically fills a 12-cup muffin pan, and we fill the muffin cups 1/2 way for some foods, like broccoli and berries, and to the top for larger portions.

When our lil' girlie was at six months of age, we began with one 1/2-disk usually mixed with a little baby cereal given around her dinnertime which is 5pm. After two weeks of that, she moved to a dinner of two 1/2-disks with some baby cereal, amounting to no more than a half-cup of food each night. At nearly seven months of age, she began having a 1/2-disk of fruit puree for 'brunch' around 10am while at daycare, which lasted for only a week. From there on until last week, she'd been given a 1/2-disk of some fruit puree mixed with some baby cereal for her brunch and a 1/2-disk of some veggie for an afternoon snack around 2:30pm. Her portions for brunch and her afternoon snack have both now increased to full-size disks. And for the past two weeks, her dinner has consisted of three 1/2-discs...

This next week, she will be EIGHT MONTHS OLD already?!? Holy schmoly, Batman!