Butter, with a side of Bread // Easy family recipes and reviews.: USING GARDEN PRODUCE TO MAKE BABY FOOD

Friday, July 20, 2012

USING GARDEN PRODUCE TO MAKE BABY FOOD

I have had a great crop of peas from my garden this year, so I decided to make some baby food.

It's a pretty simple process that takes about an hour, plus freezing time.

First, I enlisted help to pick the peas. This is the easy part! My kids are more than willing to help pick peas, as long as I don't mind them eating while picking. My kids are very good eaters, but this is really the only time where they willingly eat peas, so I am all for it!

Wash them and remove the tough ends and any remaining flowers. These are sweet peas, so I choose to leave them in the pod. It's a lot easier and I yield more than double the amount had I just used the peas themselves.

I don't have a fancy steamer, so I just use a steam attachment to my stock pot. It works well. If I was serving these peas for dinner, I'd steam them for about 5-7 minutes, but since I'm steamed a lot and it's for baby food, I steamed them for about 15 minutes so that they were pretty soft.

I let them cool for a few minutes, then I place them in the food processor. Depending on how old your baby is, you might want to puree them and add water, to make the consistency smoother. I puree them until I no longer see any clumps, then I count to 10 and call it done. By that point the puree is flowing nicely as it's being blended.

As I blended the pods and all, I then have to strain it to remove the stringy parts of the pea pod. It's not difficult and the whole process takes about 5 minutes. I place the strainer in a bowl just larger than the strainer so that it sits inside the bowl. I then use a rubber spatula to smash the puree through the strainer. Work it all around, scraping the bottom often. After 3 minutes, this is what mine looked like: