Over the July long weekend I had some catch-up projects to complete. This worked great because it was hotter than blazes outside, and my husband wanted nothing more than a restful weekend at home.
One of my many projects was to make baby food.
Baby's favorite food is sweet potatoes. I am convinced that she would eat nothing but sweet potatoes if we let her! While I am sure that taste is the biggest issue, the fun texture and ability to get it in her eyebrows is surely a huge factor as well.
While I was making my 2 batches of sweet potatoes I started to wonder exactly how much I was saving. So I calculated how much each cube or blob of sweet potato cost. Each blob came in at just under $0.13. I ended up with 2 sizes: ice cube sized (qty 24) and #30 scoop size (slightly larger, qty 34). I would say that 2 ice cubes is about the size of a jar at the store, and for the sake of ease of calculations we are going to ignore the fact that the #30 scoops are larger). So I am getting the equivalent of one jar of baby food for $0.26.
The bonus is that I know exactly the quality of that food because I carefully cut out any soft spots or scars, and steamed them.
How much work was this?
Well, I pealed and chopped 4 sweet potatoes, popped them in the steamer (2 batches), ran each batch through the food processor adding water that was used to steam the potatoes to get the consistency I needed and to get the mixture actually going, then I filled the ice cube trays and used the scoop to drop little mounds on wax paper and popped it in the freezer. The next day I moved all the cubes into freezer bags for storage. Now I just pull out what I want and pop it in the microwave or thaw it gently in the fridge if I remember in the morning. So very little work for the savings and quality.
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3 comments:
I made baby food for my son when he was younger. It's neat to see how cost effective it was. Thanks for figuring it out! :-)
Oh you are a dear! (but then I already knew that.) :-)
I've been thinking I needed to figure this out to see if it really was all that cheaper. Thanks for doing this for me!
Question: when you talk about a "scoop", what type of scoop are you using? Is it an ice cream scoop?
Last time I tried to use the ice cube trays they didn't come out of the trays as easily and nicely as I would have hoped.
By the way, sweet potatoes is a favorite of our little guy here too!
FYI--I read somewhere that one serving ice-cube-tray size is about 2 ounces. That helped me mentally measure as well as calculate the cost etc. Our boy is an EATER. He's completely on table food now, but a month ago he was eating upwards of 30 ounces of baby food per day. If we had purchased all of that--we did buy some for ease--it would have cost more $35 per week to feed just one child!!! And, like you said, you don't know exactly what you are getting in those jars etc.
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