Green Baby Series 1 of 5-First Foods

Welcome to my Green Baby Series!  In an attempt to hit more facets of life, I have asked my long time friend, and college roommate, Laura, to provide content for the series.  She'll help us learn about greener baby foods/processes, cloth diapers and more!  This series will occur once a week for 5 weeks.
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Making your own baby food is one of the easiest and most practical ways to "go green". It greatly reduces waste and allows you to support local agriculture, and it is cheaper and fosters healthy eating at the earliest age. Many parents assume feeding babies and toddlers consists of jarred fruits and veggies, boxed cereal, mac and cheese, little cups of canned fruit saturated in sugar syrup, and a number of other salty, sugary, individually packaged snacks. I am not sure when we got away from simply feeding our kids the same things we eat, just mashed or cut to their level, but doing so is healthier for them and for the environment.  Photo Right: Laura and husband Jeff and 2 boys Ben & Asher.

Easy to Do

Consider pureed banana, one of a baby's first foods. It surprises me that parents would spend around $0.50 for one little jar of processed banana (organic is even more expensive) rather than buy a whole organic banana for about $0.35 and mash it with a fork in about 20 seconds, getting even more fruit in the process. I definitely get that jarred baby food is convenient for on the go, when traveling, or the times when you literally don't have even 20 seconds, but I think a lot of parents don't even consider preparing the natural, whole version of foods when they do have the chance.
OrganicAngel's 2 cents:  I witnessed Laura mashing a banana like this for Ben when he was very young.  It was THE most common sense and obvious thing to feed him at that age!  No plastic or glass jar and no paper needed for the label.

Inadvertently Organic Snack!

Yesterday's afternoon snack was an apple from the farmer's market and a little packet of honey peanut butter.  I was explaining about how awesome this new peanut butter is to my co-worker when I realized that I was eating both an organic apple AND organic peanut butter!  A small, even if accidental, victory to log in my quest for a more organic life. 

A plug for the peanut butter:  Justin's at http://www.justinsnutbutter.com/.
The product is in REI, Vitamin Cottage and now King Soopers and other places.  It is the cheapest at King Soopers and is in the peanut butter aisle but NOT located next to the regular peanut butters.  Go further into the aisle and look for it on the same side.
And Ladies--my dream is coming to fruition-they are adding chocolate to the mixes!

A plug for the apple:  it came from Ela Family Farms in Colorado.  I don't know what variety of apple I was eating but it was delicious and dripped juice on me while I was eating it-yum! http://elafamil.startlogic.com/.

What to do when you impulse purchase a cauliflower.

Take note: this WILL happen to you.  It is not a matter of IF you will feel compelled to buy a natural looking cauliflower, but WHEN.  If you're like me, you've probably never seen a cauliflower in it's natural state.  I'm only familiar buying one at the supermarket all white and perfect looking and sometimes wrapped in plastic!  Did you know that a bonafied cauliflower is covered up by alien looking green leaves that wrap all the way up and around the white part?!  I impulse purchased this during our farmer's market excursion for only $1!  $1 is the 2009 equivalent of a nickel in the 1950s.  I was overjoyed to have procured a whole head of real looking cauliflower for such a good price.  Carrying my new vegetable away I felt awesome...like everyone in the crowd could see what I had done and was secretly complimenting my good decision and shrewd vegetable buying sense (albeit chastising me at the same time for putting it in a plastic bag).   Now I have to figure out what to do with it.  I've never felt so saddled by any one thing in my refrigerator.

This week, I'll be trying out a cauliflower recipe from Real Simple magazine.  If it is tasty, I'll provide the link to the recipe in an upcoming post.

Pondering and Biting My Nails

Am I really doing this?  This seems like a terrible way to start winter!  I can't even use up the modest amount of organic vegetables that we impulse purchased last Saturday at a farmer's market we weren't supposed to be at!  I'm pretty sure that they only allowed us IN TO the farmer's market b/c we looked like newbies.  We didn't even bring our own shopping bags with us and both felt terrible as we walked out clutching not one but two plastic bags.  Can they make those white, plastic bags any more conspicuous?  Note to self: start a company that makes plastic shopping bags that look like reusable ones.  Wait, that defeats the purpose of my newfound purpose.  Note to self: cancel previous note to self....it's immoral or unethical or genius or all three.  If you are an entrepreneur reading this, you can take the idea but I hope you wake up in the middle of the night with bad dreams about what you are doing to humanity and animality.  Note to self: load a dictionary before writing the next post.

So, this was the kickoff of my attempt to go green.  I realize that I haven't provided you with any useful information but just wait, I'm just getting started!