Time waster, money saver

It may seem like all I do is blog and take pictures of my cute kids so that I can blog about them. But sometimes I do other exciting things. Mind challenging things like make baby food, for instance. Making baby food is really easy and much cheaper than buying the little containers at the store for .56 cents for 2.5 oz. of stuff that does not resemble people food. Mandy has very discriminating taste and will not eat store bought baby food. She just won't. I've tried fooling her, switching out the containers when I feed it to her, but one bite and SHE KNOWS.

First, I cook the chicken in water. I use thighs because it is higher in protein for my precious growing baby and, I admit, it is about half the price of chicken breasts. This pile of chicken thighs was only $4.99.

Cook in water with seasonings for 1/2 hour or until you remember again. Because you are going to puree it, the texture isn't a biggy. I season the chicken with garlic (gasp!), rosemary (gasp!), itty bit of salt (gasp, gasp!), and pepper (find a paper bag if you are hyper ventilating). My baby likes her food with well rounded flavors.

I wait for the chicken to cool and then I easily peel it off the bones. It just falls off the bones if you, say just happened to have cooked the chicken for 2 hours too long. This batch yielded about 6 cups.

Here is my mixer... it is a thing of beauty and power. It is a Vita Mix and costs the same as a new computer, but you can't store your pictures in it. It doesn't mess around with tough jobs like pureeing chicken. I love this machine.

In the Vita Mix I put 2x the amount of veggies as chicken. This batch is 4 cups cooked carrots, 2 cups chicken, and 2 cups sweet corn.

After I have a fine consistency in about 2.5 seconds with the Vita Mix magic, I pour the mixture into my silicon muffin cups to freeze them. After they are frozen, the little 1/2 cup servings pop out of the muffin cups and I store them in a freezer bag for easy re-heating.

This is a 1/2 cup portion frozen and ready to heated for Mandy's lunch. I wanted to take a picture of her enjoying the meal, but she gobbles it down so fast that I couldn't grab the camera. It is really pretty tasty. I have found myself licking off her spoon and thinking, yum, that is good.

This meal costs roughly .33 cents per serving. I love saving money like this. I may not be as ambicious as some, like Annie or her friend who makes soap, but I do make baby food.

If you don't/won't have a baby at home who eats pureed food, this blog entry has been a complete waste of your time, but I hope you enjoyed wasting it. Sometimes I like to waste time too. The other day, I was following links from the Pioneer Woman's blog commenters and I found the blog of a friend of a friend. It was crazy. I opened the page and thought, I've been here before. This is Lindsay's friend. It just shows that PW's fans are really great people. If you haven't yet found her site, I highly recommend it for more time wasting.