Baby Food Face-Off!! Homemade Baby Food | A break down of the cost benefits

{Okay. I should start this post with a disclaimer. I did not make a single ounce of baby food for Gavin. I had one child. A much smaller house, that, frankly, I never cleaned, and I did not make him a single ounce of baby food. Being a new mom was all the challenge I needed at that time in my life. Why on earth would I make baby food when they came in convenient and adorable little jars?? (On a side note, this is a great blog post about how stressful being the mom of one can be.)

My second disclaimer is for working moms. I can just imagine some of the amazing moms I know who work full time jobs and take care of their beautiful children rolling their eyes and saying, “Bite me, Lisa.” This is not a post to convince you to make your own baby food. I’m not going to shove my granola ways in your face and talk to you all about the nutritional value, the environmental factors, and blah blah blah. I’m going pure economical on you. With this caveat:  If it’s at all too stressful, don’t do it. I’m just obsessed with making baby food and had to share. Let the pureeing commence!!}

This small package of 5 ounces of stage one sweet potatoes cost $1. On sale. The sweet potato itself cost $0.65. (To be fair, it was also on sale.)  I think you can see where I’m going with this.

Its not all that difficult to make either. You bake the sweet potato and then you just toss it in your food processor.

Turn it on.

And watch it run around your food processor like a terrified little hamster, remaining completely whole. Seriously, Lisa?

Ok. Let’s try this again.

Once you’ve chopped it up, it should go better.

There we go. For an older kiddo, this would actually be fine. And really, you wouldn’t have needed the food processor at all. But Quinn’s a peanut still, and we need to thin it out a little. So I’ve been adding breast milk.

Lots of baby food recipes use water to thin out the baby food, and if you steam the veggies, you could just use the cooking water for that. For this batch of sweet potatos, I used about 3 ounces of breast milk.

There we go. That will be much better for little Q Bear.

Okay, let’s see how much we got out of that sweet potato.

A little over 15 ounces!! Not bad! (If you are wondering, I did zero out the scale after putting the glass measuring cup on.)  And if I had thinned it out as much as the store bought food was, I would have gotten even more.

Next I pop it in some ice trays.

I got passed down these trays made especially for making baby food, and they are pretty awesome, but you could use just any old trays. Though these ones are pretty nice because they have lids.

Once they are frozen, I toss them in a ziploc bag and label them.

Then I throw that bag in an even bigger bag.

I kind of went nuts making different veggies.

I can’t wait to get started on the fruit!

Okay, so what’s the breakdown? Because we know the home made baby food won.

Isn’t that awesome? It’s SO much cheaper!

And fair enough, sweet potatoes are easy. It’s when you get into the chunkier stuff and the combos of food, like chicken and veggies, that it’s hard to know how to do it. But there are some really great resources out there. Like The Everything Cooking for Baby and Toddler Book. I have also found this website to be really helpful for the recipes and the recommendations of when to start what foods.

And just look how happy little Q is eating her butternut squash!