Baby Food Chef

Call me old-fashioned, or frugal, or paranoid about preservatives, but I have decided to make our own baby food.  I hadn't even consider that it was a simple-enough possibility until my former colleague told me that she was doing it for her daughter.  So my birthday gift from my husband was some cookbooks and mini containers, and the promise that I could buy myself a new food processor when we got started.

A couple of weeks ago, I started by making some carrots and sugar snap pees.  I wanted to start with a vegetable, so I went with the two the I enjoy the most, and hopefully Ella will enjoy them as well.  Yesterday, I spent a lovely afternoon making baby food with my very dear friend and a new amazing friend (I'll need to find a good nickname for her here...).  My in-laws brought melon straight from their garden (well, straight from their garden last summer and into the freezer).  We also made up some zucchini and pees to add to the assortment.

We're introducing foods one at a time.  I know that we're instructed to start with rice cereal, and that was my intent, but I apparently selected "multi-grains" infant cereal instead of plain-old rice cereal...oops!  Thank God Ella didn't have any sort of reaction!  Since then, she has gotten oatmeal and carrots, and the list will only continue to grow.  She loves to eat.  Scratch that--she LOVES to eat!  Her little legs start kicking and her arms start pumping and she smiles and screeches and gets so excited.  It's so fun to watch.

Making baby food is surprisingly simple.  I'm just using my old little food processor, but after using my very-dear friend's fancy one yesterday, I think that I'm going to take my husband up on the offer to get a good one.  And like I said, Ella seems to love it.  But then again, she's only tasted my cooking...she might not think I'm that much of a chef as she is exposed to more and more in the future.

Today's blessing was some spring rain yesterday...though I'm sure it made conditions a bit challenging for my husband and his guy friends on their camping trip!  After two years in Oregon, I'm finally able to appreciate a good spring rain in the desert, because I know that it will be sunny again soon--something I couldn't ever count on while I was living in the Pacific Northwest.