Thinking Outside the Box (or Baby Food Jar)
Well, I just wanted to share the wonderful and brilliant thing that dawned on me yesterday. As some of you know I have been making some of Aiden’s baby food from raw veggies and fruits to cut the cost of expensive jar baby food. This has mostly gone well but takes a little bit of time and knowledge of what to buy at the store. I got two books from the library that were full of wonderful recipes for how to cook and puree various fruits and vegetables for use as baby food. The name of those books, just in case you were wondering are Blender Baby Food by Nicole Young & 100 Top Baby Purees by Annabel Karmel. I had only typed up for my use single fruit and veggie recipes and none of the mixed ones. Silly me because now Aiden is on to bigger, better, and more flavorful things. 😉 Anyway, so yesterday I had to run to the store because I needed baby veggies but before leaving was asking Brandon about whether or not various veggies come in a can (like broccoli or cauliflower). Wait let me back up a little. I had no veggies to feed Aiden for lunch because we had run out of jar veggies and all the frozen ones were gone. Well, I asked Brandon what we ought to do and he said that we should feed Aiden pork and beans. (I think that beans are a legume and not a veggie but hey it works.) So Brandon threw part of a can of pork and beans in the blender and voila, BABY FOOD! I just heated it up for about 15 seconds and Aiden LOVED it! This got me to thinking well, gee we got that can for about a dollar and Aiden only used about 1/4 of it so in the end each of his meals will cost 25 cents. THAT IS 25-75 CENTS LESS THEN THOSE DANG BABY FOOD JARS!!! That brings us to me asking Brandon about canned veggies. So, I went to the store and was headed for the canned veggie eye when I spotted 1 lb. bags of frozen veggies (4 different kinds) on sale for 79 cents! Well, that was certainly a better deal then the canned food (both being a better deal then jar food) and so I bought 3 bags. I then speculated about the baby food “dinners” and looked at the possibilities of buying canned food in lieu of that. I looked at the soups (too runny, and not sure how to thicken them) and the spaghettios. Well 4 feedings in one jar of spaghettios for $1.00 versus 2 in a baby food jar for $1.00. That saves me 50 cents! Woo hoo! Anyway, I was also thinking, “Well how do we save money on baby food fruit because raw fruit can be expensive?” I didn’t come up with an answer to that until I talked with Brandon today. I told him frozen fruit is like $4.00 a bag and he said that if we only get 8 feedings out of it that is still only 50 cents per feeding (still slightly cheaper then jar baby food). Then if we look for sales on raw fruit and other things we could save money on those too. Another bonus is that you can let your imagination go wild and mix and match flavors all you want.
Think about it, you can throw pretty much anything into a blender to feed your little one, even a hamburger! Then when they are getting a little older, blend the food so that it is still slightly chunky, pull some out, puree the rest, stir the chunks back in and you’ve got something similar to Gerber 3rd Foods. Amazing isn’t it?