Frugal Foods or Disastrous Dinners? Only Time Will Tell...

One Saturday afternoon when I was eight-years old, my dad gave me some sage, money-saving advice: "Watch over the pennies, and the dollars will take care of themselves." It was an afternoon spent rolling several jars of loose change into money wrappers so he could take them to the bank and deposit them into his savings. I'd been charged with the task of meticulously rolling a 40 oz. coffee can full of pennies into their wrappers, a job that took a majority of the day to complete and one that literally paid off at the end of the day. Instead of including the $35 worth of pennies in the bag he was gathering to take to the bank, my dad put them into a separate bag and offered them to me. I would later take that bag of pennies to K-Mart and use it to pay for all the Christmas gifts I bought for my family that year. I know, I know! K-Mart? Give me a break, I was eight. That afternoon's lesson stuck with me and helped shape me into the crazed bargain-hunter I am today. That's not to say that I'm as frugal as my father would like. I'll be the first to admit that I have expensive tastes, but I'm always looking for ways to offset the cost of my extravagant tendencies by shaving pennies any way I can from our budget.

Take baby food, for instance. Gerber's "standard fare" non-organic baby food retails for 99 cents -- that's two 2.5 ounce servings per package, which calculates out to roughly $3.17/lb. If you're neurotic and have memorized produce prices like I have, then you know that's not a bad deal on some of the fruits and veggies you can buy in the baby food aisle. For instance, fresh green beans routinely cost 2.99/lb at Giant Eagle, and with the time and energy of cooking and pureeing said beans, coupled with the fact that pureeing vegetables like green beans and peas to as smooth a consistency as you'll find in the baby food jars is nigh impossible, it's not really worthwhile to make these veggies at home. But bananas? Bananas usually cost .49/lb, so paying a 650% premium for bananas that have been squished and mixed with some citrus to prevent browning seems a luxury I can't really afford. That 99 cent package of bananas would cost roughly 15 cents to make at home. I'd be crazy not to give homemade baby food a try for the potential savings it offers!

I'd be lying if I said my sole motivation in deciding to make some baby food at home was economical. To be honest, my pride is probably more a factor than I'd like to admit. Yes, I believe I can make baby food that is at least as good as what they sell in those adorable little containers. And no, I'm not talking organic. As non-PC as it makes me, I despise organic food. This, no doubt, stems from my experience eating a salad (or part of a salad) that was infested with little, white bugs that resembled baby maggots. I have a particular disdain for maggots and am pretty opposed to feeding them to my daughter. Rather, I've long believed fresh fruits and vegetables are far superior to those sold in cans or even flash frozen, and I am inclined to believe the same could be said for baby food. I also believe myself to be somewhat of a creative cook (again, my pride has a big ego) and can muster up creations as yet to be discovered by Gerber. And finally, for the same reason I like to make my own food from scratch whenever it's economical and convenient to do so, I'd like to have control over the foods Mina eats, preparing them to my own standards rather than relying on the standards imposed by the mass production and distribution of big label food companies...and all the rat-infested facilities that go along with them.

And so, I'm embarking on a new adventure that will be sure to be littered with catastrophic failures along the way. After extensive research into the best options available, I've finally invested in two of Williams-Sonoma's Beaba multi-portion freezer trays. I've bookmarked Wholesome Baby Food and have even taken more than a passing glance at baby food books, like Super Baby Food (which I quickly dismissed as fanatical after she spent the greater part of a chapter demanding we should only feed our babies organic, vegetarian fares) and Homemade Baby Food: Pure and Simple (a helpful read!). I may end up admitting defeat after several failed, possibly explosive batches of food gone awry. Or maybe I'll end up like Diane Keaton in Baby Boom, the head of my own corporation responsible for revolutionizing the baby food industry. If nothing else, I'll have at least tried my hand at one very practical way of trimming a few pennies off our budget to save up for next Christmas's K-Mart Shopping Extravaganza.