What I am wanting to know is how many of you make your own baby food?

What kind of processor (blender etc) do you use?

And lastly, where do you get the recipes?

We are very seriously considering making Ali's food ourselves so that we
can
buy only organic veggies and fruit etc..



I know most people here didn't bother wish specially made baby food, but I
did, and I enjoyed it. Looking back, I probably wouldn't have needed to put
as much time into the whole thing as I did, but as I said, it was fun, and I
liked the fact that I had so much control over what DS was eating. Now that
I'm trying to keep up with a 2.5 year old, I think DD will have to do with
less production, but I still refuse to buy jarred baby food. For various
reasons: too expensive, too much trash/recycling, not enough control over
ingredients, inferior taste.

I used a blender, a hand-cranked food grinder, and a book called Super Baby
Food (forget the author). The book goes a little over the top in some areas,
but I really appreciated the timeline for foods, the recipe for cereal,
suggestions for healthy additions, and the suggestions for finger foods and
meals. My basic process was to steam veggies until very soft, blend them,
add water as needed, strain if necessary, and freeze them in ice cube trays.
Some fruit I cooked (applesauce, etc), the rest I just pureed/grinded/mashed
and fed to DS right away.

DS preferred pureed food for quite a while, so I kept this up for longer
than I think most kids need it. Most children, by age 7-9 months, do well
with feeding themselves small chunks of soft things, cheerios, etc. So it's
hard to tell how long you might want to continue the whole process--every
kid is different.

This time around, I still plan on making the cereal (made one batch a week,
froze individual servings, total time: maybe 10 minutes, so totally worth
it), and I'll probably do the ice-cube method for certain things. But this
time around I'm more likely to just pull out veggies before I add seasonings
(butter, salt, etc), make sure they're cooked extra soft, and either give
them to DD as is, or grind them in the baby grinder or fork-mash them.

HTH,

--
Jodi
SAHM to Oliver (2 years, 5 months) & Arwen (3 months)