I want to start making Harvey's baby food as prices for the little jars are ridiculous for 2 oz. of food. I tried once before just pureeing green beans in my food processor. That ended in tears and vomiting since he couldn't handle how chunky it was. So I bought a basic food mill and tried that today. It was such a pain! I don't know if I just bought a cheap one or if this is how it always works. It went down like this:
First, I processed some steamed sweet potatoes. They were super mushy and it worked like a dream: fast, easy, good consistency. Inspired, I cleaned the mill and pushed on to peas. Here is where the headache began. These were cooked canned peas so they were well on the mushy side but they just scooted along in front of the blades. I ended up having to puree them in my food processor and then put them through the food mill. This was frustrating but I was happy with the consistency. I wanted to add carrots to the peas because Harv is at the point where we're trying to introduce combined foods. So I wash up all of this rigmarole and start over with carrots. I steamed them in the microwave until they practically fell apart as I picked them up. Yet, they also just scooted along in front of the blades. After putting them through the food processor and back through the food mill they were still too chunky for Harvey and my several hours of work ended in tears and vomit. Any advice from those who have used this method before? My food mill seems like it is of decent quality, certainly not top of the line though. It was a frustrating and disappointing couple of hours.
6 comments:
Wow, I know what you mean about rising food costs. I'm sorry but I don't really have a solution. I used a food mill too, but hated it too. It was too slow for me. I started using a food processor too. It seemed to work the best. I don't remember the food being in too big of chunks for my kids to handle though. Have you tried processing it longer? Maybe that would help the food to be more cut up? Maybe try a blender? Most blenders have the puree setting and that might help. You might even be able to just mash the food if you cook it until it's soft enough. Mash it with a fork or spoon. The one thing that I did when I was making my own baby food, was to mash up a whole big can of veggies, say the 15 oz. cans and save the portion that doesn't get eaten in the fridge. I would get about 3 eatings out of one 15 oz. can. It was nice not to have to puree food everytime I needed to feed my kid. I would recommend this to you too.
Yeah, my plan was to make a bunch and then freeze the extras so we could have them during the week. I think once he gets better with chunks we'll be fine with just pureeing them but for now he just chokes on the chunks. It is so sad to see your kid puking because of something you fed them.
I know, but don't take it too personally. He may just have an over sensitive gag reflex.
I stopped buying baby food before Christmas because it was too expensive. We started feeding Addie whatever we were eating, just super duper mashed up. I rarely plan in advance for her, we just feed her whatever we're having (we have started eating a lot more fruits and veggies because of it, though). Addie never seemed to have a problem if we just mashed it up small enough. I wonder if Harvey may have an over-sensitive gag reflex like Hillary mentioned, because we never had a problem over here. Basically, I have no ideas. Good luck.
I didn't know food was such a big deal...maybe Noah will just have rice cereal and formula until he can chew his own food. I am sorry to have no advice for you, but I have no experience with this kind of thing. I am sorry that it was such a depressing day-I would probably be sad too. Good luck for whatever you do next.
Kari, you're going to want to feed Noah more than just cereal and formula before he can chew :). But it is amazing how expensive a little jar of baby food can be. It's almost as expensive as buying a 10 oz. can of veggies. I used to wait until the baby food went on sale and then bought a ton of it. That would usually stretch until the next sale. That way I could have it to take in the diaper bag. It's kind of hard to trasport homemade baby food unless you have super good tupperware (which I didn't really have at the time).
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