Homemade Baby Food Recipe #2

OMG (yes I'm channeling teenage girls today), I am writing another blog post, and it hasn't been two weeks since the last one...

Recipe number 2: Sweet potato mush

This goes well with most meat purées...

You will need:

An oven, toaster oven, or convection oven
A medium-sized mixing bowl or other bowl
A fork
An ice-cube tray
2 medium-sized sweet potatoes

Optional--a small piece of tin foil or a baking sheet
Also optional--a clean oven mitt or a dishtowel if you suffer from tenderitis, i.e. you can not hold a hot potato comfortably in your bare hand (or the opposite of cast-iron hands...).

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Prick the sweet potatoes in a couple places with a fork (keeps them from exploding...exploded sweet potatoes are even more of a pain in the ass to clean off the interior of the oven than regular potatoes because of the higher sugar content).

You may want to place the small piece of foil or baking sheet underneath the sweet potatoes to catch any sticky drips.

Place them in the oven and roast for 1 hour or until very soft. You should see some sticky goodness seeping out of the fork holes.

You want them very soft so some of the sugars get caramelized for a more interesting and generally yummier flavor.

Let rest for 10 minutes or so to cool down a bit.

Slip the skins off of the sweet potatoes and allow the flesh to fall into a bowl (you can use your fork to help peel the skin off, but it should fall away easily--if it doesn't they are not done!).

Mash well with the fork, pulling out any large fibers or charred spots. EV doesn't mind the fibers, but I imagine some babies might. I removed them at first, but then realized she didn't mind them, so now I leave them in.

Use the fork to transfer blobs of mush to the ice-cube tray, freeze, pop them out when frozen into a ziploc, and you're done.

Follow the meat purée instructions (linked above) to defrost/use, and you now have another homemade baby food for pennies on the dollar compared to the commercial ones (and much better tasting!).

Variation: As your baby gets older, you can add spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, black pepper, garlic powder, etc.--just a touch of this last one, it goes a long way). Although you can also wait to add these until each cube is defrosted so you can vary the taste from cube to cube (this is what I do).

And a note about ice-cube trays:

Some homemade baby food websites will tell you to find the covered ice-cube trays. I never did. The regular ones work just fine, and we have never had off-tastes or freezer burn on the cubes that I have made. However, I do always pop them out within a few days and ziploc them. (Can "ziploc" be used as a verb?) I guess if you want to be more eco-friendly than me, you could invest in a bunch of the covered ones, thus eliminating the need for using the dreaded disposable plastic bags, but I am a terrible person and a rampant user of the ziplocs (also the paper towels!). (And yes I know the ziplocs can be washed too, but imo that is a big PITA!) I try to compensate in other ways, like composting and not cleaning my house very often (which, of course, saves electricity and water and releases fewer chemicals into the environment, HAH!); we can't do it all!