Adventures in Baby Food: Sweet Potatoes

Last night I jumped the gun and made baby sweet potatoes, before the 4-day trial period... I read online that very few babies have allergies to sweet potatoes, which is why they are a good first food, so I figured I'd just get them made while I had a night to do it. Plus, making them was constructive procrastination on schoolwork :)

I started out with 8 sweet potatoes, of various sizes:


After poking a few holes in each and covering the pan with foil, I put them into the oven, preheated to 400 F and baked them for a little over an hour. Once I pulled them out I split them all in half and let them cool down:


Once they were cool I removed the "meat" from the skins and put them aside in a bowl. I found that the couple larger potatoes were not quite tender in the middle, so I put the tougher chunks into a bowl and microwaved them while I worked with the tender ones. I put the sweet potato mash into the food processor:


Added some water to each batch and I ended up with exactly what I hoped for, a smooth puree:


I got a TON of baby food out of those eight potatoes! I couldn't believe how much I ended up with. 6 ice cube trays (well, almost, one was only partial so I left it out of the picture):


I spent $4.80 on the potatoes and ended up with around 50 servings (based on the notion of 2 cubes per serving), I was really excited! When it came time to remove all the cubes from the trays, I didn't have a container large enough so I put some into a ziploc, for the time being.


I am going to look into some larger containers that I can use solely for baby food. And I just have to remember that our freezer isn't enormous...so I had better make sure I have room to store everything I make! After my pear misfortunes I was very glad that this adventure turned out perfect!