Carrot-Potato Puree (Basic Recipe)
This is it, my basic puree recipe. Once I'd gotten this one right, the others were a breeze!
All the other recipes are cooked in exactly the same way, only the ingredients vary.
You can later try adding sweet potato, peas, pumpkin, broccoli, or cauliflower in a small ratio to blend in. Add only one new ingredient at a time to be sure that baby doesn't react with an allergy.
Twice the amount of ingredients in the recipe fit into my pressure cooker, which yielded enough puree to last about 2 weeks.
Gnawing on a peeled carrot was fun at 5 months, even though he couldn't bite
off anything yet
Ingredients
1 kg of carrots, peel.
300g of potatoes, peel. If the potatoes are large, cut them into smaller pieces.
I always used organic veggies, they just looked and tasted much better.
Recipe
I started off by pouring about 1 cm of water into the pressure cooker
Then I inserted the food holder into the pressure cooker
I added the carrots and potatoes into the pressure cooker
I pressure cooked for 15 minutes.
I saved about 230ml of the water out of the cooker and poured away the rest, leaving just the carrots and potatoes in the open cooker.
I added the 230ml of water back into the cooker.
I used a hand mixer to mash the water, carrots and potatoes right in the cooker. I mixed long enough to get a wonderfully creamy consistency. This took take several minutes.
I didn't add anything else, especially no salt nor sugar.
I poured the puree into jam glasses, being careful to leave about 1 cm unfilled so the puree has space to expand when deep frozen. I didn't do this at the beginning and had several cracked jam glasses.
I deep-froze the jam glasses with puree not immediately needed. I would move a jar needed for consumption from the freezer into the normal fridge a day before and then heat with the microwave just before serving.
I added one Tablespoon of organic sunflower oil per 250 ml serving just before feeding. Cooking oil allows baby to absorb the fat-soluble vitamins present in the food. I hear that rapeseed oil is ok as well. I avoided nut oils, for example peanut oil, which could cause nut allergy. I stirred well to avoid the hot spots within the food which a microwave can cause. I tasted to test the temperature my own own tongue (I didn't share baby's spoon - this is to avoid unnecessarily spreading my caries and other bacteria to baby). Also check out the info on safe microwaving and plastic usage in my links section.
After Andres' first shot at tackling a chocolate bar on his own.
Chocolate happens...