Have you ever tried making your own, homemade baby food? I remember my growing up watching my mom make homemade pink applesauce. She chopped up apples, no need to skin or seed them, then placed them in a large pot of boiling water. After the apples cooked to the disired consistency, she processed them in batches in a Foley food mill.
The food mill was a hand cranked contraption that finely ground the apples, leaving the skins and seeds in the mill with the resulting pink applesauce falling to the bowl underneth the food mill. The food mill came with different disks according to they type of food you were making - apples, squash, tomatoes, etc...
Try Your Hand at Homemade Baby Food
New moms and dads know there is never a reason to skimp on your baby's food, but they know equally well that those little jars of peas, or a chicken and carrots meal, can be one of the biggest expenses in raising a child. In those times of need, services like paydayloansonline.com can help.
Parents who are looking for a simple way to cut costs when it comes to little Jack or little Sally will be thrilled to know that making your own baby food is not as difficult as it sounds. Because most jarred or single-serve baby food that you would buy at the market is generally a combination of one, two or three ingredients, these meals are actually a cinch to duplicate at home with your own food and certainly within the means of your own budget.
Studies by various parenting organizations and magazines, as well as a mass of many parents themselves, have reported positive results when doing price comparisons on store-bought versus homemade baby foods. Those who have put the costs side by side have found that making your own baby food typically saves as much as 45%-50% over the same ingredients pre-cooked and purchased in packages. Therefore, those who make their own baby food may end up saving hundreds of dollars a month just by doing a little regular meal preparation just for their little one.
Homemade Food is Better and Cheaper
You'll want to start your venture into homemade food for your baby by deciding on a few key, simple meals to create for them. If you are transitioning from milk to puréed food, you can start with any ingredients that prepared baby food have in it, such as peas, sweet potatoes or blueberries. If you are transitioning from store-bought baby food to homemade, choose a couple of your baby's favorite meals and recreate them in your own kitchen. Rice, chicken broth, potatoes and bananas are fairly inexpensive ingredient and are typically favorites among babies who are just starting to eat semi-solid food.
Many new parents have had success making baby food in larger batches that last for a week up to even a month, and then refrigerating or freezing the meals in small packages. You might want to choose one day every few weeks as your food prep day. Dedicate a few hours on that day to gathering ingredients, steaming the vegetables, and purée all the ingredients in a blender or mixer with a small amount of water to liquefy. This concoction is the same baby food that you would buy in a jar for $1.50 perhaps, made for about a third of the price in your own home. As an added benefit, you have control over the exact food that goes into your baby's mouth, down to the specifics of whether it was organically grown and how well washed it is.
If you were on the super industrious parent path, you might even consider growing your own nutrient dense food to cook, purée and feed to your child. While this would certainly save you the most money, as your primary cost would be seeds and soil amendments, even purchasing organic vegetables and fruits in bulk for your baby's food is going to save you a bundle in comparison to the store-bought version of baby food. Over time, the process of cooking and blending the food will become a natural part of your month's or week's chores, and you will have more money at the end of the year to put in your child's future education fund.
