hi and welcome back to amazing Milestones I'm your host I'm Tara and today we're going to talk about do-it-yourself baby food advantages disadvantages what you need and how to do it we're going to go meet nutritionist Atlanta and she is going to give us all sorts of tips and tricks and pertinent information so you can decide for yourself if making your own baby food is the right choice for you thank you hi Elana hi welcome to the show thank you so there is a little bit of a debate around the question of making or not making your own baby food so why do you feel we should make our baby food well I think if you're passionate about cooking if you enjoy making Foods at home it can be an excellent option for you you can you know exactly the ingredients that are going into your dish and your little one can really enjoy the food that you've made and what are the disadvantages of doing so disadvantages would be time and planning so you do have um quite a few ingredients you need to get together and it does require some planning on that extra items on that grocery list that you have for the week um you know new moms and dads are really busy now how much time do we need to put aside to make our baby food uh well I would say probably give yourself half an hour of planning for additional items that you're going to need it's probably a good idea to prepare to make a few recipes at once rather than just one just better time management and when it actually comes to making it maybe give yourself an hour and a half or so you need to have everything cooked or steamed and then time to puree okay um so what do we need to make our baby food okay so obviously you're going to need your ingredients so if it's meat fruits vegetables whatever you're going to be preparing you're going to need a knife and a cutting board a colander pots and pans or steamer to cook everything you're going to need a blender for pureeing and then you're going to need some storage containers so ice cube trays are a really good trick for storing baby food and some plastic resealable bags are also very useful right and I see you have a pen there so you're going to want to write on the bag when you made it so you can keep track of them yes exactly very important and how do we store it uh well you're gonna store it after you've made it obviously you probably want to serve it your little one right away so they can really enjoy what you've made um if you're going to be using with the next couple days two to three days it's it's fine in the fridge and then other than that if it's going in the freezer in your fridge it's two months and in a more larger freezer you can store it for up to six months oh well we have all this stuff should we try making some sure okay we can make a chicken puree great um so this is already boiled uh chicken so let's just Cube some up we wash our hands of course of course yes that's very important exactly this in here and basically you can get whatever desired texture your little one's going to like so if you're first starting you just want to add a little bit of water no salt no pepper no if you're first introducing meat it's best to just boil it just with a bit of water so it's nice it's plain and we're just going to blend this for probably about 30 seconds or so depending on how how a fancier blender is right I'm getting hungry actually I need to have dinner okay that's pretty good and now once you've got your desired consistency that's great I mean that makes so much sense yeah and then it's just in the portion that is ready to go so once you freeze it you can just thaw out you know one Cube at a time if you're feeding you know a younger yeah I would say my daughter she's you know she's about one now so yeah two yeah two cubes I would say well thank you so much Ellen I mean I think it's also really important to note that if you are making your baby food at home that's great and if you can if you can do it all the time fantastic but if every once in a while you're tired you're overworked and you have to stop at the store and buy your baby food you can't feel guilty about that because there's so much to do and we're so tired exactly you know we do what we can yeah that's right thanks Alana thank you and there you have it all you need to whip up your homemade baby food is fresh ingredients a blender an appropriate containers for storage next time we are going to examine your pregnancy week by week we'll talk about what to expect and how to cope so see you then