First Batch of Homemade Baby Food!

Elise will be starting solids in about a month and a half. The homemade baby foods that can be frozen keep for about 3 months, so I figure that it's time to start stocking up. I made my first batch last night. Applesauce made with organic gala apples. (Gala apples are a sweeter variety.)

Here's how I made it.

I washed and peeled 4 apples. Then I cut them into little chunks. (Obviously, you don't use the core of the apple.) I put them in a sauce pan with about 1 inch of water in the bottom and brought the apples and water to a boil. Then I reduced the heat to low, covered the sauce pan, and simmered the apples for 10 minutes to make them tender (but not a mushy mess). After that, I scooped the apples out of the water and put them through my hand-crank food grinder (the one that Fresh From Florida Kids sent for free for signing up on their website).

Once the applesauce was done, I put it into the holes of an ice cube tray and put it in the freezer. That's where it is now. Four apples made one ice cube tray full. Magzilla recommended buying some baby food jars for use in the future, and I'm going to look into that.

I tasted the applesauce. It was good! I would serve it as part of an adult dinner.

I'll have to thin the applesauce down for Elise at first. I'll just use breast milk instead of water. The recipe I found said to thin the applesauce with cooking water, but I think that milk will be much more nutritious. And make the flavor more familiar.

I'm not going to start Elise on applesauce when she begins solids, though. I think we're going to start with avocado. You just scoop avocado out of the skin and mash it up. No cooking necessary. So I don't need to prepare that ahead of time. I do think that I'll start eating avocado every once in a while, so the flavor gets into Elise's milk and it's a little more familiar. I've had avocado plenty of times before, but it's not something I eat on a regular basis.

Solids! So exciting!