Making Baby Food

So I mentioned before that I am making Tommy's baby food. We had a few gift cards left for Babies R Us and I decided to buy the Baby Brezza baby food maker. I knew that, although it is a one use appliance, I wouldn't make baby food if it was too much of a process.

So here is my experience with the Baby Brezza. Yesterday I decided to make some more sweet potatoes. I bought one large potato for $1.22.

I pealed and chopped it up in to smallish sized pieces, the manual recommends 1/4-1/2 inch thick:Then I filled up the blender (I didn't take a picture of this but I also put the water into the reservoir as instructed by the manual):

The next step is to put on the top and press the "steam and blend" button until the light under 25 is lit since it takes 25 minutes to steam a sweet potato (also in the manual):
Then you just let it go! I was doing this while the SU basketball game was going on. I missed a few minutes in the beginning of the game to peal, chop, and load the basket of the blender but then I got 25 minutes to just let the machine do it's job. After it was done I found this:
I poured it into an ice cube tray to freeze and got 11 cubes worth:
When I feed Tommy, I thaw 2 cubes and mix with 1oz of breastmilk and he gobbles it all up!

Now for a bit of a downside. The blender really doesn't hold all that much. I did buy a pretty large sweet potato but I had to do two batches to steam and blend the whole thing. One whole (large) sweet potato got me 21 ice cubes worth of food.
That's really the only drawback I can think of and I'm pretty sure it has to do with making sure the whole batch is steamed thoroughly. It's really so little work that I don't mind doing a couple of batches. The convenience of being able to steam and blend in the same appliance really out-weighs the negative here.

For $1.22 I got 10.5 servings of sweet potatoes making the cost about $0.12 per serving. A jar of Gerber sweet potatoes at my grocery store costs $0.53 which gives me a savings of $0.41. However, if I was not making my own baby food I would have bought Earth's Best brand which is $0.85 per jar giving me a savings of $0.73 per serving! Beyond the financial savings, I really feel like Tommy is getting good, nutritious food and I know exactly what is in it.

The parts of the Baby Brezza are nice and easy to clean, the machine is easily wiped clean and almost all of the parts can go in the dishwasher.

Overall, I'm very happy with it so far. I've made sweet potatoes, carrots, peas, pears, and apples. All have been very easy but the peas didn't come out as smooth as I would have liked even though I manually blended them for longer. I'll have to look into how to make them smoother. Any questions about the Baby Brezza or suggestions? Let me know!