Having a baby in Indonesia totally changed things for me! I have babysat kids before, but that just meant locking them in a room with a movie and a box of pizza for a of couple hours. When you have your own you have to feed them multiple times through the day. Milk is easy! It's the solid foods that shake things up. That "routine" you once had changes when baby starts eating solid foods.
Baby food here is easy to find, but it's not great for your baby- or so I'm told. The nutritional facts are in Indonesian and even if they were in English they would be foreign to me! There's a high content of added sugar to the food here. If you want an imported jar of baby food it would cost 30,000 rupiah at todays exchange rate that is $2.47 for ONE (tiny) jar of baby food. Kate would most likely eat on that precious jar of baby food for atleast three days. Ok, I'm only kind of kidding. This led me to...
making my own baby food.
You read that right.
My lovely helper bought a pumpkin, sweet potato, and an avocado for me from the open air market. We tried the avocado first.
She gagged and then threw up. That was her first taste of solid food, maybe it was the texture or the taste. We're not sure, so we'll try it again some day.
The other foods took some prep work on my part. I pulled out my pressure cooker and cooked the pumpkin and sweet potato separately. I followed a recipe for the sweet potato that said to add a certain amount of water. The amount wasn't enough, and my kitchen and eventually the whole neighborhood smelled of burnt sweet potato.
But I just added more water to the pot and kept going. :) (As soon as I wrote this I realized why she may not like sweet potato...)
After the foods were pressure cooked, I peeled them. They were so easy to peel!
The pumpkin just came right out. It went straight into the blender to puree. The same thing was done with the sweet potato.
After this I scooped the food into a plastic ziplock bag. I just cut the bottom corner off like you would for piping icing on a cake. I then squeezed the food into an ice cube tray. The trays came with lids and I just labeled the lid with a dry erase maker. (Toot!! That's me tooting my own horn- because I think this is cool!)
I thought Kate would love the sweet potato. She just tolerates it. We introduced pumpkin to her recently and she ate two or three cubes. She gobbled up a whole tray within a few days! We have one more tray of sweet potato, which we'll push through. But that girl loves pumpkin. She makes "yummy sounds" when she eats it. She was so messy, but our friends gave us some pacifier type things with netting on it instead of nipples. You just push the cubes into the netting, close it up, and she eats her food like that. There's less mess and we know she's getting more food. She has already mastered the trick of moving food around on her plate to make it look like she ate it all- or rubbing it in her hair or chair.
I'm thankful she likes to eat. I'll be making more food soon. Never in a bazillion years would I have thought I would be making baby food. If we were in America would I choose to do the same?? I have no clue, and thankfully I don't have to choose! :) One thing is for sure, the girl's gotta eat!
