Cost Effective Home-made Baby Food

In our family, raising a baby is a team-sport! Naturally, when my first granddaughter recently reached the age where she was ready to be introduced to solids, we all took notice.

Staying within the framework of “natural, cost-effective and time-effective” seemed the sensible route to follow. We bought some veggies, steamed them, let them cool and ran them through the food processor. We scooped a few teaspoons full into a number of silicone cupcake holders, placed a piece of wax paper on top of each to keep it clean and packed them into the freezer. It was easy to pop the veggie-cubes out once they were frozen, as silicone is naturally flexible and it peels off the sides of the cubes easily.

It may be necessary to introduce a new taste and texture as many as 10 to 15 times before a baby accepts it and starts to actually swallow to the extend that one may call the experience “eating”. Many parents translate the perplexed look on their baby’s face when he tastes something new as a sign that he doesn’t really care for that kind of food. As a result, they give up far too soon. Who can blame them, considering the price tag that typically comes along with every experimental session?

It’s so much easier to defrost only a few teaspoons of the healthy good stuff when you need it.

The three biggest benefits of preparing food in this way are:

• You can control what goes into it.
• You can control the texture – serving everything 100% smooth is not ideal as you want to introduce texture as well.
• You can convert a 1 Kg pack of carrots into 18 servings. That comes to 45c per serving if you paid R8.00 for your carrots at a typical supermarket in South Africa.

I suspect that many other mothers and grandmothers must have thought of this before, but in case you haven’t – I hope this helps.

Best wishes! Lizette van Huyssteen

Written by Lizette van Huyssteen

"When we know better... we do better."