Butternut Squash baby food at home

It's really a lot easier than it seems to make your own baby food at home. Here I've made some yummy butternut squash for little Max, who will be starting solids in a few weeks!

2 medium sized fresh butternut squash (I picked mine up at the local farmer's market, while not certified organic, this squash was grown locally without pesticides or herbicides and in organic soil)

I like to bake mine cut in half with the seeds scooped out (I also washed and dried the seeds to grow my own squash!) But you could also chop it up and steam it. It helps to cook it to soften it up for the blending process.

After the squash is lightly cooked and cooled scoop out the meat and discarded the skin. When baby is better able to chew you could opt to leave the skin on and not blend it as much. I add this to the food processor.

I use my Hamilton Beach food processor for this job. I picked it up on clearance at Target for about $20, originally I think it was $60 though). You could also use a high powered blender in small batches or a hand blender. Start to puree the squash and slowly add water in small batches to get the desired consistency.

There you go, you have baby Butternut Squash puree! To make small frozen portions I like to use a mini muffin pan and a cookie scoop. This gives me estimated single portions and is easy to freeze up to 24 pucks at a time. 2 medium squash yields approx 24 pucks.

If you end up with extra pucks save them for later! Add them to soups, stews, sauces, casseroles or other baby food combinations like turkey, chicken, potatoes or a vegetable medly.

Here are the pucks next to a bag of homemade chocolate chip waffles, recipe coming soon!!!

Green Green Beans

I picked up some locally grown green beans for .99 a lb. While these aren't certified organic they are grown without pesticides or herbicides and in Organic soils. It helps to get friendly with your neighborhood farmers market as these details sometimes aren't advertised. I ended up with about 4lbs of beans. I followed these directions for freezing green beans


http://www.ehow.com/how_2326482_freeze-fresh-green-beans.html

I did about half the beans to start and froze them whole in 1qt freezer bags after snapping off the ends. This will be either additions to soups or sides for meals for all of us. The other half I blanched and pureed up for baby food for my munchkin. Even if I over do the quantity on these (I'm sure I'll end up with A LOT of puree!) I can add them to other pureed foods like chicken and potatoes or even pasta sauces and casseroles.


After blanching I added these to my food processor and pureed the heck out of them. Green Beans are stringier and coarser than the squash we blended up in the other post. I still added water in small increments to the beans as they pureed but blended them for about double the time. They are still more coarse but will be palatable for my wee one.

I used a mini muffin pan and a cookie scooper to dole out approximate portions. I stuck this in the freezer for about half an hour then added them to a plastic zippy freezer bag that I labeled with the contents and dated.

Here are the green bean pucks

It helps if you have small helpers snapping the ends off the beans. After they sifted through the discards for bean seeds which we'll try and sprout to grow our own.