Column: Savagemama

Puree, Liquify, Squish: Making Baby’s Food

By Jennifer Savage, 5-24-07

Our refrigerator is a wee thing that dates back to the Eisenhower administration. When a friend wisely bought a new, sparkling clean model in which no one had ever spilled grape juice, I begged for her cute, little, totally-fits-our-farm-house-kitchen-and-is-totally-impractical-otherwise cast off. She was only happy to hand over the classic appliance. This fridge has one door, rounded corners and is barely five feet tall. It opens with a quick pull of the large silver handle centered on the door just for this purpose and it slams shut no matter how quietly you try to close it. I love this fridge and crowd bottles, cartons and tortillas together trying to convince myself that it isn’t too small. I cut the stalks off of leeks to make them fit and strategically place lettuce as far away from the freezer compartment as possible so it doesn’t turn black with frost.

Lately our already pushing it to capacity fridge has become even more crowded. I’ve been making room in the smallest spots for tiny glass baby food jars. I cram them behind the three squat containers of yogurt, beside last fall’s apple butter, on top of the canisters of homemade relish. They clink together as I stack them into a wall three high and four wide making the half and half totally inaccessible.

In fact, our kitchen is filled with these tiny jars. They crowd the dish drainer, the second shelf where the bowls hang and cover the countertops. They are always involved in some sort of process; washing, drying, heating, cooling. We fill them with pureed, squished and chopped fruit and vegetables for our daughter to eat one small spoonful at a time and repeat “mmm, mmm” with every bite.

I never thought I’d be one of those people who made my baby’s food. I always figured some company had perfected recipes and processes and that I as a consumer would benefit from their years of research and trial and error. So when Eliza started eating solid foods we bought jars off the shelf of our local grocery store.

That first day standing in the baby food aisle I chose organic bananas and squash. My husband and I eat organic food but not exclusively. We live in Montana with a 100-day growing season so fresh fruits and vegetables are often brought to us from some place else. And this makes them expensive. So we buy organic when we can but when it came to buying baby food that day I chose organic without question. The tiny jars in my cart were going to introduce a world of food to my daughter and somehow it mattered more than it ever had that that food be as free of chemicals as possible.

It went on like this for a month or so, grocery bags with jangling jars inside. There is a sign in one of our local grocery stores that reads, “organic doesn’t mean clean,” and in the case of organic baby food I would argue organic doesn’t mean tasty either. After a while, I noticed that most of this food was pretty bland, even for baby food. Carrots weren’t sweet to the tongue; bananas had the tanginess that comes from being overripe (and they were pink as my father-in-law pointed out), apples tasted a little metallic. So we steamed some carrots one day, put them in the blender and within a few tries, came up with a creamy, sweet, electric-orange meal. We emptied our freezer of the carrots and zucchini we grew and froze last summer. We let thaw the peaches and nectarines Eliza’s grandparents picked in Oregon on their way to see her the week she was born. We ground, we liquefied, we pureed these into small helpings and fed them to our baby knowing whose hands had pulled them from the ground, the stalk, the tree.

Last night I came home and Seth had steamed the last acorn squash we could find anywhere. He’d steamed zucchini and carrots. He’d pealed mango and pears, bananas and apples and whipped them into various combinations. Bananas, mango, pears. Bananas, apples. Apples, pears, mango. Bananas, pears. He’d filled several ice cube trays with these concoctions and filled the fridge with as many full glass jars as it could hold. He walked me through it all.

“Okay so the yellow stuff with red flecks is apples, mangos and pears. There are some jars of it and a whole tray of it in the freezer,” he said. “The green stuff with the dark green flecks, that’s zucchini, the chunky green stuff is peas. Jars and trays.” This is a part of our communication these days. We go straight from how was your day to did she poop to yellow stuff with red flecks. It may sound perfunctory and rote but to me it’s intimate and loving.

He was wrist deep in acorn squash as he was telling me all of this. With his thick hands he scooped the deep yellow meat from the skin of the squash and added it to the growing heap in the blender. I wonder if Eliza will taste his capable hands when she eats this batch the same way she tastes me when she curls up next to me to nurse in the early mornings. I wonder if she will taste a little bit of her backyard when we eat our peas in a few weeks or potatoes this fall.

We don’t make Eliza’s food because we feel as though we are better parents for doing it. We don’t even do it so much because it’s healthier necessarily although there is a strong argument that it is. We do it because by being closer to her food, we feel closer to her and closer to each other. In having conversations about yellow stuff with red flecks with Seth I feel toward him equal parts gratefulness and desire. His love for our daughter shows as he stands over a blender pureeing squash and, honestly, nothing could be more attractive.

I think about this every time I open our refrigerator and the wall of tiny glass jars we’ve built nearly falls onto the kitchen floor with the jerk of the door. I think of our baby, growing healthy and strong, and hope that maybe we are having a little something to do with it.

Jennifer Savage writes about being a Western mom on her own blog here on NewWest.Net. Read more from “Savagemama” at www.newwest.net/savagemama.

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