My Latest Project

So, I know for many of the moms that I'm friends with this is nothing new to them, but to me it is pretty fun and exhilarating.  I've decided to make my own baby food for Lucy.  With all three of my others I just bought the jar food, but this can get pretty costly, and with a family our size and with me being the stay at home mom, part of my job is to learn where we can save money and cut costs.

So, let me nerd out on you a bit and go into some detail.  Baby food stage one comes in a two pack.  This two pack costs 88 cents.  Lucy goes through 4 a day, two for lunch and two for dinner (breakfast and bedtime she has cereal).  This roughly comes to $52.80 per month.  That is a pretty hefty chunk of change for a one income family.  So, this is why I took on this endeavor.  I'd love to say it was for the health benefits, but that just ended up being a secondary perk...

So, I decided to puree my baby food.  I did peas, carrots, sweet potatoes, broccoli, butternut squash, bananas and pears.  I used the magic bullet and food processor.  I found that the magic bullet worked better than the large food processor because I could work in smaller portions and add more water or add more food as needed, whereas with the big processor if I messed up I would have lost the whole batch, and it also made a MUCH bigger mess to clean.

There is a shot of the sweet potatoes.  They look pretty gross, but I actually tasted them and I couldn't believe how yummy they were.  They were NOTHING like the jarred kind.  Once I tasted how good these meals for Lucy were and once I realized how much fun I was having making them I was hooked.  I wish I would have done this with all my others.

After I pureed the food I froze it into ice cube trays.  Two cubes equal about one jar of food.  So, after I was done with all the veggies, I counted how many meals I had and how much it cost me.  The total cost of the veggies came to $5.48, which if I would have purchased equal amounts of Gerber jar food it would have cost me $24.64, so it was a total savings of $19.16!  Score!

After the cubes of food were frozen, I popped them out of the ice trays and sealed and labeled them in ziplock baggies, to pull out for easy servings.  Lucy LOVES the food.  The cool thing about this is I can also puree leftovers of my own meals as she gets older and she will all ready be used to the flavor of our cooking!  I even pureed some leftover chicken noodle soup the other day and froze them into cubes (she is not quite ready for that yet, but I will have it when she is ready for the next stage!)

This project was so much fun, I thought it was going to be a huge chore and not worth all the work.  It is a bit time consuming, but it was actually fun and relaxing, and I loved knowing how much money I was saving and exactly what was going into Lucy's meals.  I'm totally converted and will never buy another ounce of jar food again!