Mom's Best Organic

First of all, I'm sorry I haven't blogged in a few days. Perhaps you are not.

Second of all, I'm sorry in advance to the majority of you who will find my topic of choice today incredibly non-applicable to your own situation. Perhaps you will say that I should keep it to myself if it's not helpful to most. And perhaps you would be right. But perhaps I would remind you that this is my blog and I can write about whatever I want to write about.

But that would be rude. So again, I apologize.

Anyway, now that everyone has rolled their eyes and clicked off my boring, unhelpful blog, I will get to my point. Baby J has reached the ripe old age of four months, and has been spending dinner time perched in someone's arms staring intensely at our food and drooling a river all over his clothes. I know that I can't hold him off much longer, so my thoughts have turned to how I am going to appropriately and as inexpensively as possible feed this next little human in the line of little humans I have to feed.

I'm sure his appetite will rival his brother and sisters, who will quite possibly have eaten us out of house and home by the time they reach puberty, after which they will most likely eat us out of everything after that which is possibly left. Baby J shows no signs of being any different. It seems that MacGyver and I can only create famished eating machines. And so poor MacGyver's salary for the next twenty years or so will be spent keeping these people from eating the furniture.

In the past, I've bought just about every kind of baby food you can imagine. Now that I'm in my organic/natural state of mind, there really is no option (at Walmart, anyway) but Earth's Best Organic. I have completely forgotten how much these little 2 1/2 oz jars cost, but I believe it's around a dollar (possibly a little less for the smallest jar.)

So today I rounded up Eldest and we went to the farmer's market to buy $3-4 worth of peaches. At the grocery store I bought extra organic baby carrots (Somewhere around $3.) I set about my experiment in the kitchen, armed with a food processor and ice cube trays. I cooked the carrots until they were not quite as crunchy as raw, but not soft. I washed off the peaches, cut them in half, removed the pits and stuffed them into the food processor. Everyone complained and put their hands over their ears, but regardless, about three minutes later we had pureed peaches, almost exactly like the jars of peaches only I left the skin on so there are red flecks.

After that, the carrots met their demise. These needed some of the water that I cooked them in to get to the right consistency, and a few minutes later around 60-70 1 oz portions were in the freezer. A couple hours after that, I transferred them to a ziploc bag where they will happily await Baby J's anticipated baby food debut.

35 jars of baby food would be.... uh.... (I'm afraid to guess because my math is just THAT bad.) around $30 I suppose? Give or take? Feel free to shame me if I am wrong. And I spent a whopping $6.

I'm a happy camper. So when I am about spending horrid amounts of money on food for this crew, I can keep in mind that it could always be more.

Comments? Suggestions? Math corrections?