I make baby food, part two

After attending a playdate on Friday where some of my mommy friends were talking about how they don't make their own baby food, I started to rethink my stance on homemade baby food. Is making your own baby food that cheaper from buying it in a jar?

Good question. So I decided to investigate.

I went to Farm Boy and bought four butternut squashes for a grand total of $6.66. Roughly, a jar of baby food is about 70 cents. I don't know about you, but I don't recall what jarred squash tastes like. It has been some time since I was a baby. According to one of my mom friends, it tastes horrible. I have no doubt that this fact is true as I have tasted jarred green beans and they are bland. No wonder darling daughter wasn't too crazy for them a couple of weeks ago.

After lunch, I decided to proceed with my experiment. I cooked up the butternut squash, which took a good hour. I let it cool before scooping the squash into a bowl. I got out the hand mixer in an attempt to get rid of the strings. Afterwards, I threw it in blender and added some water. I hit the puree button and waited for the blender to do its magic. I must of had too much squash in the blender because it wouldn't blend at all. I took half the squash out and tried it again. Success! (Honestly, I don't think making homemade butternut squash purees has to be all that complicated, but I'm anal when it comes to purees). This process took a good 30 to 40 minutes, at which time my dear husband got grumpy because I had overtaken the entire kitchen and he couldn't make a sandwich for lunch.

I ended up with about with the equivalent of eight, four ounce jars. And if my math is correct, it works out to be 83 cents per four ounce jar for my homemade squash puree. So there is a 13 cent difference between my homemade puree and the commercial purees available at the grocery store. My math doesn't take into account the electricity costs used to cook the squash and to power both my hand mixer and blender. And it certainly doesn't take into account my husband's grumpiness after he realized that making a sandwich would have to wait.

According to Ruth Yaron's Super Baby Food, making your own baby food, and I quote, is like "making money at home." She uses carrots as an example. Now, maybe I'm not being fair as I used butternut squash as the subject of my experiment, which isn't all that cheap. Carrots I can see fits into her "making money at home" philosophy. Anyway, I intend to continue with my experiment. I have apples, mangoes (they were on sale) and pears to make in the coming days.