On Sunday morning, we were driving to meet friends for breakfast and I caught a snippet of a show they were doing about making your own baby food. The guest, whose name I didn’t catch, said something to the effect of “with the state of food safety the way it is, you just can’t trust even baby food makers to be vigilant, so you should make your own instead.”<\/p>\n
This rankled me. More maternal guilt, that’s just what we need. And where do we get the ingredients to make our home-made baby food? From the supermarket, of course. The same supermarkets which have recently had e-coli scares with such wholesome foods as tomatoes and spinach. Making your own baby food is a great choice if you have the time and the inclination. You can control the ingredients and, sometimes more importantly, the texture. But it’s certainly not the only choice and I honestly don’t think it’s a lot safer than the commercial options.<\/p>\n
Which reminded me that I don’t think I’ve ever told you the story about the first time I made baby food for Tristan, because I too thought it was the best choice from a nutritional and economic standpoint.<\/p>\n
I bought a book of baby food recipes for $26, and decided to start with something simple: carrots. Organic carrots, of course. In fact, organic baby carrots, because they were for a baby. I bought two bags, which at the time set me back about seven dollars. I also bought a steamer pot from Ikea for $40. (I still have that pot, and it’s one of my favourites, FWIW.) I prepared one of the bags of carrots by scrubbing them and cutting the ends off. I steamed them within an inch of their lives, for maybe six hours. Okay, I exaggerate, but it was surely close to half an hour of steaming.<\/p>\n
I put the carrots in the blender with a tablespoon or so of the reserved water, just as the cookbook recommended, and turned on the blender. The carrot mash was sticking to the sides of the blender a bit, so I used my also newly acquired wooden spoon (I really didn’t do a lot of cooking in those days) to scrape it down a bit. Without turning off the blades. And promptly filled my freshly made organic baby carrots with a healthy dose of splinters.<\/p>\n
So I dumped that batch in the trash and washed out the blender and the blades and started all over again with the other bag of carrots. Wash, cut, boil the snot out of them. Put them in the blender. Forget to put the lid on the blender before I hit the “puree” button. Bits of wet carrot splatter everywere, and I mean everywhere<\/em>. Weeks later, I was finding carrot bits under the microwave and on the underside of the range fan.<\/p>\n In the end, I got about four servings of carrots out of the whole thing. Net cost per serving, excluding the cookbook and the fancy new pot, was $1.75 or so, compared to 67 cents for the jars at the grocery store. You do the math.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Sunday morning, we were driving to meet friends for breakfast and I caught a snippet of a show they were doing about making your own baby food. The guest, whose name I didn’t catch, said something to the effect of “with the state of food safety the way it is, you just can’t trust … Continue reading “Baby food and the culture of fear”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mothering-without-a-licence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}