Free Baby Food: Yes Please!

As many of you know, baby food is rediculously expensive!  While it's super convenient to open a jar and shovel it in the mouth of a hungry baby, (and believe me, I'm not above that!  Sometimes it's totally worth the convenience) it can save so much money to make your own baby food. 

Now, I have two children under two and seeing as they are still on different nap schedules (working on that one folks) I don't have a lot of time to whip up tons of baby food. Enter the brilliance of my new food processor.  Nathan and I have been married for 3 years, and I finally used up the last gift card we were given in order to buy it.  It was well worth waiting that long.  I have used it SO much-and it makes whipping up baby food a BREEZE.

I also live in a small rental right now and the fridge is a small size.  Meaning, I don't have a lot of room to freeze tons of homemade baby food.  So, because I don't have a lot of room to freeze the food, and I don't have time to be making tons of brilliant recipes, I've simply made it out of some things that would have gone bad had I let them sit.

Over labor day, when we were helping my sister and brother-in-law on the farm, they sent us home with a bunch of green beans.  We ate some for dinner the next few nights and still had a bunch left that would've gone bad before we ate them.  Enter baby food idea.  I simply threw them in the food processor with a little olive oil and salt and pepper to make it delicious (babies deserve good food too, you know), poured it into ice cube trays, froze them, and put them in zip lock bags.  In about 10 minutes of work, I now have 42 meals of green beans for Briga-bud.  That's about 21 jars of baby food and roughly $10 saved.

Then, my neighbor brought over some peaches from her tree. Once again, we ate a bunch, but they were going to go bad and I already made a ton of canned peaches with my mom, so I decided to simply make some more baby food.  Using the left-over 8 peaches, I got another 38 meals for the wee one.  That's about 19 cans of baby food and another roughly $10 saved.  You don't need to add anything to peaches, but I had some applesauce that had been in the fridge for awhile, so I added that which helped it stretch a little farther and it will be more fun to eat:).

Also, as I have been teased for, I'm an obsessive label-er.  Obviously this is baby food (when was the last time you froze food for yourself in ice-cube trays), but I couldn't help writing it on the package-it's like a disease with me;)

I can't wait to bust these out in the next few months to see if Brigham loves them.  If he doesn't, I didn't spend any money, so no harm.  If he loves them, that's $20 and time running to the grocery store saved.  In my eyes, it's a win/win!

Thank you, thank you to those of you who so willingly gave me your hand grown delicious food.  We loved it and hopefully Brigs will too!