Makin' Baby Food....

This morning was "Makin' Baby Food Morning"....the nicer part of my morning but I promise not to go into that.
I started thinking in the silence of my work, as you do, that it is really satisfying to prepare my own baby food and it's quite nice to be back there doing it all again this time around. It's such a simple thing to do taking only a couple of hours once every week or two. I simply puree whatever my chosen food is, cook (preferably steam of course) and freeze in good old ice cube trays to later transfer into labelled bags to be stored in the freezer. At a later date I just start to mash instead of puree when bub is ready for a lumpier version, and then only until bub is ready to eat finger food with us. Not long really.
I am quite proud of the fact that to this day I have never even purchased a single jar of food. My only purchases have been some organic rice cereals for starting out, that's it. Once that quick stage is over I then start cooking my own Congee (definitely omitting the salt that's included in these instructions) from rice. I'm not keen on this as my baby's first food because it still has a slight lumpy texture to it and so I find it's not as smooth as I would like for those first little mouthfuls....well at least when I cook it anyway.
I have been called something similar to conservative about introducing foods to my kidlets, waiting a week or more between food introductions and definitely delaying things like meat and dairy etc but I feel safe in knowing exactly what is in their food, that it is fresh and that I am giving their digestive and immune health the very best start I can. I can also say so far that I have a 4 yr old Daughter who will try almost everything strange and eat every vegetable and "odd bod" (what I consider most delicious and slightly gourmet) bit of food she is given, if hungry of course....that includes chilli, curry, tuna, herbs, olives etc. Her favourite vege is currently zucchini which recently and suddenly overtook broccoli. We are yet to see if Mr Number Two proves my method works. ;)
I don't know if it's saving us money as well. I haven't crunched any numbers. I don't even know what a jar of baby food costs but I know what preparing my own is worth to us.