How To Make Your Own Baby Food

Nutrition Consultant Lianne Phillipson-Webb shows us how simple it is to make your own baby food at home.

Melanie Raposo: So Lianne, what ingredients and supplies are needed to make homemade baby food? Lianne Phillipson: Ingredients are depends on what you're going to make. When your baby is say 6-9 months, you really just going to start working with single purees. So your ingredients for say apples, apple sauce is just apples. Your ingredients for carrots is just carrots. So that could be single. Once they get to about 9-12 months, you can start giving more interesting, you can add in some garlics, some spices and herbs and things like that. So ingredients just depends on how old your baby is and where you are starting. Equipment that you need to make your own baby food is really simple. You can be elaborate or you can use the really simple and easy things which I think are most important. You need a really good peeler to peel all of your fruits and vegetables. Things like zucchini don't need to be peeled later on. Apples and pears may not be need to be peeled but in the beginning for textures, too texture having out on the skin on the lot of fruits especially. So you can just use your peeler to peel whatever it is that you are working on. Then you need a good knife that you are comfortable with to chop and make it small enough, the smaller say a carrot is. If you make a sort of 1 centimeter cube or so of carrot, that will be a lot faster to cook. Steaming food is much preferable over microwaving or boiling or even baking. Once your food is steamed and you've put your knife in so that it's really soft and tender. Then this is my favorite appliance, small appliance to puree your food with. You can use a big food processor. You can use -- small people have smaller choppers or smaller food processors. It doesn't really matter what you use as long as you get a puree. Melanie Raposo: It's important once the food is prepared to serve properly. Lianne recommends freezing it, which will keep your baby's food fresh for as long as three months. Lianne Phillipson: So you can use an ice cube tray, you can use one you have already. This particular one, the Fresh Baby So Easy baby food trays have a lid, which means say for instance, in the Mommy Chef classes, it's easy to take your food home with you when it has a lid or it also helps to minimize freezer burn. So once this is frozen, you remove the lid, you run the back under hot water and then you pop this out, put into a ziplock bag. Name what the food is because there is a lot of foods that look exactly the same, apples, pears, cauliflower look the same. Then date it, because you can keep that food for up to three months. Melanie Raposo: And once the food is ready, the fun part is watching your baby enjoy it.