Wednesday, August 06, 2008

I'd need more cabinets

As you know, since Zachary's been eating solids I've been making his food. I started out with just purees, but now I'm adding some chunkier foods as he's getting better at chewing/gumming. In addition to the smooth purees, he's eating brown rice, barley, oatmeal and lentils quite well. He's not so great at finger foods yet (the transition from fingers to mouth is a bit inconsistent), but he's managed stewed blueberries, "oh" cereal, bits of tofu and some cantaloupe.

Anyway, when I make his food, I make a big batch and freeze it in ice cube trays. Then I transfer the cubes to plastic containers and mix and match cubes for each meal. I mix some of them together (sweet potato, chicken and barley) and serve others on their own (peas, peaches, zucchini). I also defrost fruit cubes and add them to his oatmeal.

This system works really well when we're at home. The problem comes when we travel, because the frozen cubes don't travel well. Not only are they difficult to transport, but I need a microwave/stove/hot water to heat them for meals. Thus, I use store-bought baby food for traveling.

I just got enough jars of baby food for the first three days of our upcoming trip to Texas. That's 18 jars, since he eats 5-6oz of food at a time (one 4oz jar + one 2.5oz jar per meal). 18 little glass jars! 18 glass jars we have to pack in our luggage, six of which need to be in our carry-on bag so we can feed him en route. I felt silly and a bit wasteful buying so many individual jars at the store. I can't imagine doing this for all of his meals, every day. Where would I put all of those little jars? And who would help me carry them home from the store?

Here are a couple baby food pictures. The first shows my freezer, with about 20 days worth of frozen food cubes (plus about the same in frozen milk, just in case we need it). The second shows my pile of 3 days worth of baby food jars.

3 comments:

Deborah said...

How do you cook the chicken you are feeding him? People in my peps group are interested in starting meat, but no one knows what to do. And did Zachary just naturally like all of these foods, or did you have to do some kind of crazy tricks to get him to eat say barley, or green vegetables. Benjamin is still uber picky.

wenmei said...

I steam the chicken, then cut it up and puree it. It gets grainy and then really globby while I'm pureeing it, so I add some of the water that I used to steam it to make it a little thinner and easier to pour into ice cube trays.

So far, Z will eat anything I give him. But I still use pears as my magic bullet for suspicious food -- I mix in one cube of pear at first, then less each time. That's how I got him to like peas.

I mix things like barley, rice and tofu in with veggies (sweet potato, peas, avocado), because he won't eat them otherwise. I think they are a bit too chunky and bland on their own.

the Albino Bowler said...

Hey nice blog. I see you are a horse lover. I'm just finishing a funny post about horses. It's called "The Shoecake Game" and I'll drop it on the Kangaroo Rodeo late tonight. Check it out.
Hope to chat with you soon...
M-