11/12/07

freshly made baby food


Before we had Zane I already had made the decision to prepare his baby food from scratch. After doing some research this decision wasn't a hard one for me to make. I knew it would be more work, and it has been, but it has also been truly rewarding to know exactly what is going into Zane's growing body. Has it saved us money? I really don't know because I have spent a bit extra to buy the fruits and veggies organically and locally grown.

You know the game you play at baby showers where you pass around the jars of baby food and smell/taste them to guess what they are? Half the time people are saying how disgusting it smells. I would love to do that with this food because it looks, smells and tastes so much better. Well except for the usual suspects of smelliness like cooked broccoli and spinach. There's a lot more options for different foods too as the jar kind doesn't have as wide a variety.

I bought three books that have been very helpful with this process: Fresh Baby So Easy Baby Food, which I also have the trays from also, Super Baby Food, and Blender Baby Food.

It really has been somewhat of an easy process, buy the food, cut it up and place it in the microwave in glass containers with some water. I then puree it with a food processor and then place it into ice cube trays to freeze. When it's time for Zane to eat we grab as many cubes as we need and heat them up. It does take some extra time though and sometimes that was a bit frustrating when I was making baby food over the weekend.

I really have felt passionate about this with Zane and will continue to monitor which processed foods we provide him with. Does that mean we'll completely keep him from eating junk food and other things? No, but we'll educate him on why it's important to eat healthy and to try to stay away from things that use pesticides, are processed, etc. as much as we can.

I don't judge people at all that choose to use jar foods. Each person has something that is their choice and we just decided this worked best for our family. I'd encourage everyone to give it a try though, even if it's just for some of the foods. You'll want to eat the left over apples with cinnamon!

Paying attention to what Zane eats has also made us look more closely at what we put into our bodies. We've changed things over time and will continue to change things.

Here's a simple list of organic foods to pay attention to that you can use for any age.

A strange choice for Best Shot Monday, but check out others at Picture This!