My son has passed the 6 month mark. Hard to believe. It’s time to start him on some real food and I wanted to start off right, with fresh, whole ingredients that I made for him myself. At least I wanted to give it a try.

I’ve had many friends rave about making homemade baby food, and others who found it daunting. Now that I’ve begun, and since I’ve been making alot of our food from scratch, I can see that it does require time and that my being a stay-at-home mom allows me the freedom to try more homemade food.

Baby’s first food was avocado, and since then I’ve pretty much followed the mash-it-up and ice cube tray storage method. It has worked well for me and made it easy to pull a couple cubes out of the freezer each morning. Since baby is only learning to eat real food, I removed the cubes from the trays, cut in half and through the halved cubes in ziplocks. I find I’m wasting less this way.

The one food I’ve tried that hasn’t gone as smoothly is homemade brown rice cereal. I’m having a hard time making only 2-3 days worth and getting the consistency I want. Baby is NOT excited about brown rice cereal, so I’m going to wait on that a little longer until he can handle a chunkier consistency.

It feels good to know that, for the most part, he is learning to eat “mommy’s cooking” from the start, and we only need to rely on jars of food in a pinch or while traveling. For now, making his food from scratch is an option that is working for us.

I’ve been making some progress on my homemade wish list and have come up with a few more to add. It’s really fun to make things from scratch to see what actually goes into the things that we usually buy from the grocery store.

I’ve made yogurt several times, and hummus, one of our favorite snacks.

I’ve also successfully made whole wheat pizza dough and think next time I’ll make a few at the same time and freeze a couple. Super easy, and tasted so fresh!

I used a recipe from Simply in Season. The KitchenAid mixer with bread hook made the 8 minutes of kneading a breeze. Then only time was needed for the dough to rise, from this…

To this…

Then we just rolled it out and baked it briefly before adding our toppings. A delicious, healthful and easy dinner.

The Pillsbury crust I usually bought was $2.99. The store does carry “fresh” crust for about $1.99. My homemade crust cost less than a dollar. And I know every ingredient that went into my crust, so that’s worth something too.

Haven’t tried crackers or pie crusts, but have added a couple other items to my list:

• mayonnaise
• granola cereal
• mozzarella

We went peach picking spontaneously last weekend. You could smell the ripe peaches as we walked through the grove.

We enjoyed eating fresh peaches all week and grilled some to top dinner salads a couple of nights, based on this Paula Deen recipe. I baked a double batch of peach muffins, which were delicious, and froze half to enjoy later.

To enjoy the rest of the peaches over the next few months, we froze two quarts of peaches sweetened with simple syrup and two quarts without sugar. Here’s how we prepped them:

• Drop whole, ripe, peaches in boiling water for 2 minutes. It’s important that the peaches are ripe.
• Remove to an ice bath to stop cooking process.
• The skin should slide off the peach fairly easily at this point.
• Slice peaches, removing pit.
• For those peaches that will be sweetened, cover with lemon juice to avoid browning, then add simple syrup until well coated.
• Ladle into quart-size ziplock freezer bags.
• For unsweetened peaches, mix with lemon juice to avoid browning and freeze flat on was paper in a cookie sheet so they do not stick together and then store in ziplock freezer bags.
• Don’t forget to label the bags with the contents and date!

I never would have predicted that having a baby would bring out the cook in me. Granted, my hubby and I have long loved trying new flavors, cooking together, testing new recipes. But the fact that I’m doing most of the cooking now as a stay-at-home mom, our smaller budget since becoming a one-income family, and my recent commitment to buy local whenever possible, I’ve gone gang-buster for making-from-scratch foods I would have typically bought at the grocery store.

I’m using Super Baby Food as one of my resources as I plan to make as much of my son’s food as possible. And because the hubby and I eat so much yogurt, I thought I’d try that well in advance of when baby is eating yogurt, so I can get the hang of it.

In the last week we’ve made 6 quart-size batches of yogurt - 3 have failed (although we’ve used that tangy milk for smoothies), but we’ve been enjoying our 3 successful quarts.

The How…

(there are many recipes online)

• First, we scalded the milk to 185 degrees Farenheit
• Then, we let the milk cool to approximately 115 degrees Farenheit (the milk needs to remain between 90-120 degrees in order for the yogurt cultures to survive)
• Once cooled, we mixed in 2 Tablespoons of plain yogurt with live active cultures (using plain Stoneyfield Farm yogurt for the first batch - no we can use the yogurt we made as a “starter”)
• After covering the jars, we’ve tried a few different methods for incubating the yogurt, which takes many hours. The option that has worked for us is keeping the jars of yogurt-in-the-making in a water bath on the stove on the lowest temperature. Every hour or so we’ll move the yogurt off the heat so the temperature doesn’t rise too much.
• After 4-14 hours (the longer you incubate, the tangier the yogurt), refrigerate to thicken the yogurt further and voila! Homemade Yogurt!

Afterthoughts…

This (and many others from our perspective) method does require some baby-sitting, so it’s best to do when you plan to be home most of the day. If we find we are making alot of yogurt I may invest in a yogurt-maker.

For us, whole milk came out the thickest and creamiest not surprisingly, but we also had a batch of 2% milk work. To make the resulting yogurt thicker, we strained the whey out through cheesecloth to achieve the desired texture.

The cost breakdown…

I generally buy either individual servings of organic Stonyfield Farm yogurt for $.99 a pop, or the quart size occasionally for $3.99.

Our yogurt (using organic milk for $3.69/half gallon) costs about $1.50/quart. Definitely a cost savings that’s worth it!

Making food for me has become a new creative outlet. Once someone who hated spending time in the kitchen, I now relish trying new recipes, making food on a budget, planning meals around some random item that’s already in the cabinet (for example a jar of roasted red peppers will be perfect for weeknight paninis), and trying to make food from scratch.

We recently made jam, and tried our hand at yogurt (post coming soon). But I’m also interested in making several other items to see if it’s worth my time to make more from scratch, like:

• Hummus (excited to try this recipe courtesy of Food in Jars)
• Crackers
• Pizza Dough
• Pie Crusts

I think I’ll make one of my summer goals to try at least a couple new “from scratch” recipes a month. I’ll keep you posted!

I recently mentioned we’ve been enjoying lots of summer strawberry treats - bread, shortcake, smoothies. Well, with 18 pounds of strawberries, we needed to make much more than that.

Hence, our jam-making and canning Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago. Now, I wouldn’t recommend having to make use 18 lbs of strawberries when you have an infant. Not the most stress-free process, but regardless, you’ll have lots of yummy jars to enjoy for a good long while, and to share with family and friends.

Here’s our play-by-play. We used this recipe, minus the butter. In past years we have used this pectin-free recipe, but beware that very ripe berries don’t have enough natural pectin to make a jelly consistency. Your “jam” will still taste good, but it’s more like strawberry syrup.

After dividing up our strawberries for baking & freezing needs, plus some fresh berries to give away, we washed, hulled, and roughly chopped the remainder.

Next, we crushed the berries using our KitchenAid and added them to a big soup pot. In the meantime, the other one of us washed and sterilized the jars and lids and boiled water to seal the jars in a water bath.

One the crushed berries were in the pot, we added the appropriate amounts of sugar and pectin. You can also add a squeeze of lemon juice to enhance the flavor of the berries. Do not overfill your pot. Based on multiple years of experience (and big kitchen clean-ups), the pot should be no more than half full (we really learned our lesson this year!)

After the berry-sugar mixture is ready, line-up your jars and ladle them full of jam, leaving an inch of head space at the top. Add your lid and screw the top on, then place in water bath using a pair of tongs.

The water should cover the jars by at least two inches. Bring the water to a boil and boil jars for 10 minutes. Once the 10 minutes is up, carefully remove jars using tongs and place on a hot towel.

Within minutes you should hear a “pop” letting you know your jars have sealed. If they do not, run them through a water bath again, or place in refrigerator and use within one week.

With 18 lbs of strawberries, we went through this process several times over several hours. Needless to say, we’re set on jam for all of our weekend breakfasts and PB&J sandwiches. It’s also delicious warmed to a syrupy consistency to use on pancakes or ice cream. Yum!

Now that it’s July, it’s blueberry season. We’ll try our hand at a *small* batch of blueberry jelly since we haven’t made a different type of jam before. Will let you know how that goes. Plus, stay tune for my first experience with homemade yogurt making.

I love strawberry season. The hubby picked 18 lbs of strawberries this weekend and we made all kinds of goodies - bread & muffins, sweetened strawberries for shortcake and whole sweetened strawberries from this suggestion on Simple Bites. Interested to see if the berries maintain their texture in the syrup. We froze some berries without syrup for baking and smoothies. Oh so much strawberry yumminess to be had.

Plus, we made ALOT of jam - we won’t need to buy any for a year and we’ll still have plenty to share with family and friends! Stay tuned for the jam-making play-by-play.

Before strawberry picking season comes and goes, take note of these great ideas from Simple Bites for freezing berries to enjoy all year long. Who doesn’t want a reminder of summer in January?

After we pick berries, we always make a years worth of strawberry jam (and some extras for gift-giving), a couple loaves of strawberry bread, freeze some sweetened berries for shortcake and some whole berries for baking, and sometimes even some strawberry ice cream. I’m excited to try the strawberry coulis suggestion this year.

How do you enjoy your freshly picked berries?

Last week I attempted my first slow cooker recipe in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day and my hubby’s Irish roots. The corned beef and cabbage turned out great and we paired it with some yummy Irish Soda Bread.

One thing we’ve tried to do more is embrace leftovers and those are always better when you can change them up a bit. We like St. Paddy’s leftovers better than the main meal….corned beef hash with eggs. We changed it up a bit. Instead of only using the potatoes and corned beef, we threw in all of the veggies from the slow cooker - carrots, celery, and cabbage, too. We chopped everything up into small pieces, warmed it in a pan, then topped with fried eggs (poached eggs are yummy too).

I’d love to hear about your ‘leftovers’ recipes. This is a great way to get the most out of your meals (and your money!).

Life with a baby AND cooking dinner each night is a bit daunting to me, even though I’ve come to enjoy cooking more over the last few years. Several folks have encouraged me to simplify the cooking process by; use of a slower cooker. We own one. I’ve never ever used it, but I’m excited to try, because we may never otherwise eat a home-cooked meal at a reasonable hour. (I realize we still might not).

Did anyone see the movie Julie & Julia? Well a friend turned me onto this blog with a similar concept, only to try a slow cooker recipe each day of the year instead of Julia Child’s artful creations. To christen my crockpot, I decided to start with a St. Patrick’s day favorite, corned beef and cabbage. There will be Irish soda bread too - yum.