Homemade Baby Food for the Fall – Exploit Your Oven

Oct 12, 2009 Friendly Baby Food Advice, Pinchin' Pennies

One of the reasons we love to advocate homemade baby food is due to its natural goodness, both for baby and for the environment.   When making baby food, it’s easy to exploit your oven and stove top and thus, use minimal energy.  This post will focus on exploiting your oven in the Fall.

Make oodles of homemade baby food (and some family dinner foods too) with minimal effort, time and energy use.  Once all foods are cooked, you not only have a yummy dinner, you have lots of foods that baby can enjoy for about 1 month!

Exploiting Your Oven with Fall Baby Foods

Foods to use:

• 2 medium acorn squash (butternut may be used but they are more large in shape and more difficult to double up in the oven)
• 4 sweet potatoes
• 4 macintosh apples
• white potatoes (double what you normally use)
• 4 medium broccoli heads – the clump of florets
• 2 turnips
• 2 pork tenderloins

Preparation:

Acorn Squash – cut in half, scoop out seeds and place “face” down in a large baking dish with about 1-2 inches of water (sprinkle some pumpkin or apple pie spice into the water is desired.

Sweet Potatoes – wash and clean thoroughly, leaving skins on.  Poke holes in the sweet potatoes while they are still wet, wrap with foil.

Apples – Cut top from apple, remove core while leaving apple intact, with peel on.  Sprinkle water into the apple and wrap with foil.  You can wipe a wee bit of butter inside the apple if desired.   The apples with be standing up in the oven.

White Potatoes – wash, peel and dice.

Broccoli – wash and chop if needed.

Turnip – wash, peel and cut into dices.

Pork Tenderloins – Brush with olive oil and rub with spices of your choice.    We love to use a mix of nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper and ginger.  Place in a baking dish.  Peel, core and slice 4 apples and add to the baking dish with the pork.  Toss in a few raisins if desired.

Method:

Turn oven to 375 degrees F

Put squash on the bottom rack.  Place the sweet potatoes on either side of the baking dish.   Bake for 20 minutes while you prepare the pork.
Put pork tenderloins on the top rack  and place the wrapped apples on the sides.

White potatoes, broccoli and turnip – Boil the potatoes until they fall apart with the piercing of the fork.  Steam turnips and broccoli on the stove top until they are fork tender.

Finale:

Acorn Squash – scoop out squash and puree or blend as desired (you can use a hand held blender for this).

Sweet Potatoes – cool sweet potatoes a bit then slip off the skins.  Puree or mash as needed.

Apples – unwrap the apples and then blend or puree as needed.

White potatoes – whip with a blender, season as desired (if using salt, take out the portion you will be using for baby prior to using the salt)

Broccoli – Puree or mash as needed.

Turnip – Puree or mash as needed.

Pork Tenderloins – once out of the oven,  allow to cool a bit and then cut into slices.  Dice or shred as needed for baby

Allow to all foods to cool a bit  and store in fridge until the next day.  On the next day, transfer all foods to ice trays or containers that you use for freezing and freeze your Fall Baby Food Exploits!

Tips: The squash and sweet potatoes will take the longest to bake, this is why they should go on the bottom oven rack.   Pork should be fully roasted within 45 minutes or so, depending on the size of the tenderloin.  Remember, roast 20 minutes per pound of meat.

The apples may leak some juice while baking so you may want to put them in their own baking dish if you can get 2 baking dishes on the top rack.  If you can’t fit another dish, put the apples on a small cookie sheet.

Remember to save some for your dinner!

How to Make Organic Homemade Baby Food

Sep 1, 2008 Friendly Baby Food Advice, New Baby Food Recipes, Pinchin' Pennies, storage

We continue to receive a lot of email asking us how to make organic homemade baby food. There seems to be a certain mystique that continues to surround organic cooking. The recent organic trend has seen a lot of media hype that leads you to believe you must do something special to make organic foods of any kind! There’s no secret to cooking organic homemade baby food. You make organic baby food the same way you make “conventional” homemade baby food except for one difference – you buy and use organic foods.

Yep, that’s it! The only thing you need to do differently to make organic homemade baby food, is to buy organic ingredients You use the same cooking and storing methods and the same appliances and tools too. You can believe the hype that organic foods are healthier but don’t buy into the hype that it’s mysterious or that you must buy an Organic cookbook to prepare organic foods!

Tags: Organics

Organic Find of the Week

May 18, 2008 Organics, Pinchin' Pennies

I’ve been trying to post my <cheap> Organic food finds when I have gone grocery shopping. 

 Just this Saturday I found Organic Avocados for a pretty smooth price.

Yep, Organic avocados were selling for $3.79 for 4 avocados.

Conventional avocados were selling for $3.69 for 4 avocados.

While there was no bargain here, the cost differential makes buying the Organic avocados pretty cheap!

Learn all about Avocados and what a great first food they make for babies!  We have many avocado “recipe” ideas as well as information about selecting avocados and storing them too!  Visit our  Avocados page!

Tags: Avocados, Organic