How To Save On Baby Food. Homemade Pear Puree

  One of the things I have done with all three of my bambino's is I have made most of their baby food.  There are actually three reasons for this.  The first reason and the one that got me started on making my own baby food was cost.  $1.00 or more for 7 oz of food seems pretty steep to me.  The second reason is I read packages.  Even organic baby food seems to have more ingredients than I would have thought and don't get me started on the non organic kind that mixes the meats in.  It's just more than I think is necessary.  The third and now foremost reason is taste.  Have you ever eaten a stage three baby food that has meat?  If you have I bet you never will again.  Even the stage one banana is not so hot. 

  I think that the main reason people do not make their own baby food is they feel that it is inconvenient and takes to much time.  Read on to the end of this post and after the recipe I will tell you how long it took to make.  You can be your own judge on if it is worth the time or not.

  With these things in mind I ventured out into making my own baby food.  Now like I said before I do not exclusively make my own.  When there is a good deal on organic baby food that tastes good and has a minimal number of ingredients I will certainly pick it up. Note the pear I used here was not organic only because they are hard to find right now.

  Over the next few weeks I am documenting a little experiment I decided to do to see how much making your own baby food really saves you.  My thought going into this is that some fruits and veggies like bananas you will save a bunch and others may actually be cheaper to by packaged when they are on a great sale with a coupon. 

  So on with the recipe and the final numbers on baby pear puree.

 
  I find it best to use really ripe fruit so it is easy to puree and it is tastier and  does not have to be watered down with water to blend.  I realize this does not look so good but trust me it is a nice tasty pear. 

  You want to start be removing the skin.  I use a potato peeler because it tends to remove less flesh than when I use a knife.  I guess I'm to heavy handed with the knife.

 Next remove just the core of the pear.  You want to use as much of the pear as you can to maximize your savings.

  Next you want to pop that pear in the blender.  You can see from my photo that I have a baby food maker.  The baby food maker is great when you are making small batches of food which is what I typically do.  It's less clean up.  However you can do the same thing with a blender or a food processor.

  Blend for about 15 seconds and then shake up the mixture.  If you are using a blender it may be better to get a long spoon and mix it up.  Then blend for an additional 15 seconds.

  Voila!!! 3.5 oz of baby pear puree. 

Now to see how long it took and what the savings were.
  The total time this took me including taking the photo's was 3 minutes.  Yep only three minutes. 

   I'm going to base these figures on the average cost of 3.5 ounces of baby food in my area.  Typically I see the two packs (3.5 oz each x 2) for about $1.00 on special.  So 3.5 oz would be .50.
 
 In this recipe I used a 7 oz pear that cost .69 per lb. So I paid .31 for this pear.  After the skin, stem and core were removed I was able to puree a smidge over 3.5 oz.  So that would give me a savings of .19.  My daughter is 5 months old right now and easily eats 3-5 oz of food at every solid meal so to me this saves about .58-.65 cents a day if she only ate the pears.  That's a minimum of $17.40 per month in savings. 

  I'm eager to see how much I save on other baby food mixes.  A quick tip if you just want to try a few easy puree's.  Bananas, avacados and kiwi are very easy to do just like this pear.  Wow that was long!  Maybe the next one will be in video form if I can convince hubby to be the camera guy.