Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Easy Baby Food

When it came time to decide whether we should buy baby food ($$$$) or making our own ($) we decided that it is probably in best interest to just bite the bullet and make our own baby food. However there are many different incentives to make your own baby food besides the obvious monetary value. The biggest one being that I can control the nutritional value of the food that I am putting into Chloe. So here are three different baby food recipes that are great to start your little one on and are pretty simple to pull together.
**Please note that homemade baby food  can be frozen in ice cube trays or in specialty baby food freezing trays and kept in the freezer for up to 3 months. Make sure you put the cubes in a freezer bag with no air so that it does not frost bite!

 Sweet Potato Baby Food

 * Sweet potatoes are a great first food for baby! The consistency is smooth and is loaded with great nutrients, including Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Pantothenic Acid, Niacin, Folate, Potassium, Phosphorus, Magnesium, Calcium, Sodium, and Iron. 
 
Ingredients:
1 Sweet Potato
Water or breast milk
Directions:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Wash sweet potato. Poke holes in the sweet potato with a fork. Place sweet potato on a foil covered baking sheet and place in oven. Bake for 30- 60 minutes or until soft. 
Slit potato lengthwise and scoop out potato meat. Use water or breast milk to puree or thin the sweet potato. 
 

Blueberry Apple Sauce Baby Food

* Please note that many do not think that you should feed a baby raw blueberries before 8 months old because of food allergies. However it is commonly accepted that once blueberries are cooked they are not as threatening to younger babies.
Ingredients:
1 pint of Blueberries (fresh or frozen)
2 medium apples
1 cup of water  
Directions:
Bring water to a boil. Peel, core and dice apples. Add blueberries and apples to sauce pan and simmer for 15 minutes until soft.
 
Reserve liquid and use a slotted spoon to transfer blueberries and apples to blender or food processor and puree.
If needed, add some of the liquid to the blueberries and apples to make it smoothie consistency. 

If the blueberry apple sauce is too thin, mix with baby cereal to thicken.

Avocado Baby Food

 Ingredients:
1 Avocado
Directions:
Slice avocado in half and remove meat into a bowl. DO NOT COOK! Use a fork or hand mixer to mash avocado.
If your baby does not like the consistency of the avocado (like Chloe who will gag) try mixing it with apple sauce to make it thinner. Simply use the recipe above without the blueberries.

Welcome Welcome

Hello Everyone. My name is Courtney and I am a 25 year old stay at home mom of one. Well actually one human baby and one fur baby (who requires just as much attention). 

The goal of this blog is to share crafts, recipes, cleaning ideas, organization ideas and fun stuff with the everyday mom. There are plenty of ideas for the above all over the internet but the problem is that a lot of that stuff is written for the Robo-mom. The mom that apparently has all the time in the world... or has pretend children. Or maybe their children are older or perfect but that definitely is not my life. My baby is active! And she keeps me running around the house all day. But that does not mean that I don't like to be creative, eat good food or to loose all the baby weight that I gained during my pregnancy.

So here I go. I will check out things all over the net. Find things that work and things that don't and let you know what I think. I am not saying that just because one thing works for me or doesn't that it will be the same for you but at least you can see a real world application instead of the perfect picture of Pinterest.