Frugal Friday

Yeah! I am getting one out on time! Cheer for me! I have been trying to get this post done for two weeks and something always seemed to come up. Well, I finally got it done this week, so here goes.

This weeks post is on making your own purees. Now, I know you are wondering why would I do that? Well, I am not a hug veggie lover, and neither is my family. So a few years ago I heard about a couple of cookbooks that added purees to everyday recipes to get kids to eat their veggies and love it. Turns out that hubby and I loved it too. The cookbooks are
Deceptively Delicious, and The Sneaky Chef. I have both and highly recommend them. So where do you start? Start with various veggies. This time I used butternut squash, acorn squash and sweet potatoes. I have also done carrots, cauliflower, and broccoli.

The veggies I did I baked in the oven on 350 until they were soft. The squashes were done sooner than the sweet potatoes, so I took them out sooner.

You do need to clean the seeds out of the squashes, and poke holes in the sweet potatoes for the air to escape. I place them on parchment paper to save on mess.

Scoop out the flesh from the squash and peel the skin off the sweet potatoes. Put the flesh in a food processor and puree on high until smooth.

Pour into ice cube trays and freeze. Then store them in a freezer Ziploc bag until they are needed.

I put these into everything I can think of where they will be hidden, tacos, spaghetti, soup, casseroles, meatballs, mac and cheese, etc. Click here for one of our favorite puree recipes. I also used this same method to make baby food for Landon when he was little. I was surprised at how long it lasted. I would make purees one day a month and would have plenty for him to eat. It worked great for us and was so much cheaper than buying baby food.