Loving the Manning Triplets: Culinary Wizard Tackles Baby Purees

Grocery shopping. Babies everywhere!

I never thought I'd be the type of mom that was fascinated by every little developmental milestone my baby mastered. Heck, back then I had never even heard the term "developmental milestone." I mean, who cares if your baby eats solids? Doesn't everybody learn to eat at some point? Alas, motherhood has made me more uncool than I could have ever fathomed. Just so everyone knows, our munchkins recently began eating solid foods.

I decided very early on that I wanted to try making their baby food from scratch. Unlike cloth diapers, which I felt wholly committed to after the initial financial investment, making baby food was such a small up front cost, I felt I could throw in the towel at any time if it didn't work out.

I started out with a few internet searches, a 50 cent yard sale book, and a quick trip to the grocery store. I might have been a little overly ambitious. For some reason, rather than beginning with one or two recipes, I thought it would be a good idea to make the entire first chapter of the baby puree book. It wasn't.

Sweet Keira. A rare picture that I'm actually in.

Food-making essentials. I know what a parsnip is now!

Logically, I decided to begin with the first recipe in the book. Pureed carrots. Step one: peel and chop carrots. Easy enough. Just like any person with my culinary expertise would do, I walked over to my computer and googled, "how to peel and chop carrots". Seriously. It's something I've never done.

I figured it out! Also figured out this knife was excessive for the job.

After the carrots were peeled and chopped, I steamed them with a little organic unsalted butter. According to "Top 100 Baby Purees" by Annabel Karmel, the beta-carotene in the carrots is absorbed more readily when cooked with a little bit of fat. Who knows? I like butter, so why wouldn't the babies?

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After the carrots were nice and soft, I blended them up in my teeny tiny food processor. After several miniature batches and a few colorful words, I vowed to find a better way if I were going to continue this venture. Now I use a Ninja blender; it's the same one we use to blend up the absurd amounts of formula we have to make every night.

When the puree was finished, I placed it into silicone ice cube trays and put it in the freezer.

After it was frozen, I placed the cubes in gallon-sized Zip-loc bags and labeled with the contents and date. That's all there is to it. It's been about two months and I'm still making their food. They've had bananas, apples, pears, avocado, sweet potatoes, broccoli, and mango to name a few, Next, I'll be making combinations for them to try. To be honest, it hasn't been particularly difficult. Just time-consuming. And that means something coming from someone who is as lost in the kitchen as I am.

Why would I choose to add more work to an already hectic schedule? I'd like to say the main reason is that it's so much healthier and tastier for the the babies. But, to be honest, that's just a great big bonus. The real reason is because it's so much cheaper than buying organic baby food at the store. I'm talking roughly a quarter of the cost. I've always been one to spend less money on the have-to-have items so that I can allocate more for the want-to-have things. If spending a couple hours a week making baby food means that I can buy some fabulous shoes or a wildly unnecessary purse, I'm all over it.

Before I married a budget conscious accountant (what was I thinking?), I would eat nothing but Ramen for a month so I could purchase a pair of Manolo Blahniks or go to a music festival. The year after I graduated college, I actually had a friend at the Wendy's down the block that would give me leftover food after the restaurant closed so I could eat for free. I guess I still have a little bit of this crazy girl inside of me, albeit tempered by my reasonable better half.

That being said, don't think I'm totally numb to the well-being of my children in the name of frugality. I am crazy about the benefits of homemade food and cloth diapers; I just happen to also be imperfect and even a little bit selfish at times. I'd like to think this is normal. Human, even. In the advent of mommy wars and intense parental judgment, I think we all need to be honest with ourselves. Nobody's perfect, and we shouldn't have to pretend that we are.

Here are some outtakes from the latest Manning baby photo shoot. The only goal: three smiles at once.