Fruit and Vegetable Purees II

Little hands speed through his first batch of sweet potato, so I set out to make him a second batch. This time I documented the process.

I decided since I was heating up the oven I might as well make Little Hand's next food, apples, while I was at it. I chose Braeburn apples because they would handle the baking process well. Little Hands thinks they're too tart, so next time I may try Fujis.

Prepare the sweet potatoes: wash, pierce, and wrap in foil. Note I made the mistake of piercing through the foil. This left me digging out four bits of foil out of every potato. I've never noticed this in my own baked potatoes (oops), but it caught my Mama eye in the finishing steps.

Prepare the apples: core the apples, place in a pan with 1" of water. We don't own an apple corer, so DH used a metal teaspoon to core the apples for me.

Bake in a 400* F oven. The apples will be done in about 30 minutes: fragrant, fork-tender, and the skin is dark. Reserve the apple baking liquid for thinning. The sweet potatoes will be done when they're squishy; about 1 hour. (In this picture you may or may not notice that I tossed some potatoes in for DH and myself.)

I initially took my Kidco Food Mill to the apples, but that was a lot of work and it was just creating a standard applesauce texture.

So I had DH take the immersion blender to them instead. Same texture. Much faster. Add water from the baking pan as necessary to aid the blender. Use the same liquid to thin the applesauce to the desired viscosity.

Measure out the sauce for freezing. Most people seem to use an ice cube tray. I like the perfect, 1/2-oz squares this Wilton brownie bites silicone pan makes.

Remove the peel of the sweet potatoes. Then prepare in the same fashion as the apples, adding your choice liquid for thinning. I tend to thin my baby food as little as possible in favor of controlling the viscosity after thawing.