Babyfood Peaches

Ok. This is my food blog. In its conception, it was supposed to tell many a wide variety of things and talk about restaurants and the food network and use of local produce and all of that, but when it comes down to it, my first topic is far from the topics that I thought I would publish. Babyfood.

My baby turned six months old a couple of weeks ago. This is the age that you are supposed to be feeding them solid food, or at least start. And last night, as I was putting her to bed after hours of nursing, I discovered that I had almost no milk left and it was time to start trying to feed her solid foods if she is going to keep this growing thing up.

And I knew this, I just didn't know that it would be TODAY.

When I was at my dad's house visiting a couple of days ago, he had an inordinate amount of peaches. His wife was out with a firefighting crew and their fridge had broken, so she was sent home on a break with tons and tons and tons of peaches. I figured that I would try my hand at preserving them, but after my little girl's fight last night, I decided that it was time to try my hand at babyfood making instead.

Luckily, the food mill I got for the occasion was ready to go, but the book is still sitting in my Amazon shipment que, so it was off to the internet for me.

I discovered that with peaches, you want to steam them. I thought that it was a crazy idea, but it actually made them a lot more soft and easy to work with. After about 10 minutes of steaming, put them in the mill and round and round they went.

The food mill is a rather wonderful invention. One way, it squishes things through and the the other way, it scrapes the stuff off the bottom so that you can then squish more food through. It was definitely worth every penny that I payed for it with. It took out all the fibers and left me just with the soupy stuff at the end.

Once I got all 20 peaches milled, I then mixed it with what was left of the steam water. It was more like steam syrup. The water had all evaporated, and there was just a little bit of sugar (natural sugar from the peaches) left with some water and a bunch of vitamins and minerals. The water was actually a strawberry color.

I got a nice watery applesauce texture, that tasted pretty good with no preservatives or other crap they put in the baby food these days. I know where the produce came from, and I am excited to give it to my baby.

The coolest thing is that I froze them in icecube trays. It makes the perfect serving, and now I can thaw them out one at a time as I need them. I got 40 servings from 20 peaches. Not too bad eh?