So the Dudeling is starting on (semi-) solid foods, and since we wouldn’t want to eat out of a jar, we don’t want to make him. We tried zipping things up in our blender, but it doesn’t purée all that well (it does with larger items, but not baby food-sized portions). So we’re looking at food mills and the like. We’d like to get to the point where we take a bit of whatever we’re cooking that night (sans, say, habaneros) and mash it up for his dinner.
There are, however, a dizzying array of food mills out there, and we’re not sure what to look for. Any recommendations? Steel? Plastic? Giant mill wheels? Brands? Recipes? Horror stories?
My sister did this. She had a hand operated food mill and a small food processor. The hand operated one was handy at restaurants, but was probably more work then you would want for everyday use. The small food processor was something like this.
Do you mind an alternate suggestion? Keep using the blender. He doesn’t need things to be pureed (how did you do the accent?) and as long as the food is soft and small he won’t choke. A food mill is fine, but if you can get it mushy in your blender you are probably set. After a lot of reading and worrying about starting our daughter on solid foods it’s how we decided to go with the NAFlett and we are doing fine. She eats oatmeal and sweet potato and squash and avocado with not many issues. As long as its cooked and mashed she gums and swallows it just fine even if it’s a bit lumpy.
In fact a lot of what we have read point to the idea that lumps are good. You want to teach them how to eat as much as anything. I’m not saying something they could choke on, but a little lumpy is better.
Also, why buy more? You already have something that is designed to pulp food. There is enough new stuff you *have *to buy when you have a baby why add to the list?
Keep using the blender or food processor. Make large batches and freeze in Baby Cubes, which you can use later for a whole host of things.
You’ll only give baby foods for about four months before they start moving on to finger foods, so you don’t want to buy a separate gadget to make their food. Josie was eating things like broccoli cheese rice casserole by the time she was ten months old. I didn’t make all her baby foods, but I made probably 75 percent of them, and I did it all in large batches in the food processor.
I wouldn’t waste money on a special device. The stage of puréeing their food is short, and as they progress it’s preferable to make the purée more coarse. I started out using my blender, and progressed to using a fork or potato masher. I think NAF1138 is exactly right - if the baby is swallowing and digesting the food then it is as fine as it needs to be.
If the blender works well on larger batches, make larger batches of baby food and freeze them. I used to cook carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, sweet potato, beans, peas and so forth and freeze them individually in icecube trays. Mixing and matching the cubes meant I could vary the flavor of her meal each time so she wasn’t eating the same mix of vegetables until she worked through the batch.
There was a brilliant suggestion in an earlier thread on making baby food: when you go to a restaurant, bring a garlic press with you. Use it to moosh up a bit of your own food, then feed it to the baby. I wish I remembered who suggested this, so I could credit him/her.