Roasted Carrot Baby Food
Roasted carrot baby food is a great first food for babies! It's easy to make and keeps well either in the fridge or freezer!
Roasted Carrot Baby Food
Jump to RecipeWelcome to Spring Cookbook Week on Macheesmo! I’ll be posting recipes from five cookbooks this week and giving away copies! All winners will be announced next Friday (06/05).
Well, the moment has finally arrived where the nutritional needs for Theo have started to shift from Betsy to me. He’ll still get most of his food from momma, mainly because he’s absolutely terrible at eating, but slowly and surely he’ll start eating solid foods now!
I’ve had a bunch of people email me since Theo’s birth saying they can’t wait until he can eat solids so they can see all the fun baby foods I come up with! Well, I’m excited for that too, but to be honest, it’s also a bit scary. I’ve heard that at some point you can just puree whatever you are eating and give it to them, but I wanted a bit more guidance as I started exploring baby foods.
So, while it might not apply to everybody out there, I wanted to add a baby food cookbook to Cookbook week! The Best Baby Foods was recently released and the publisher offered to send me a copy to test out on the dude.
We are starting slow with the solids and Theo only has a few under his belt at the moment: Rice cereal, avocado, and this easy and actually delicious carrot puree!
It’s barely a recipe but easy to make and you can make about a gallon of it for what carrot baby food costs in the stores.
Roasted Carrot Baby Food
Equipment
- 1 blender
Ingredients
- 1 ½ cups carrots
- 1 cup water
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 300 degrees F. Cut carrots into 1 inch pieces. Optionally toss with about a tablespoon of olive oil.
- Roast carrots for 30 minutes until tender.
- Add carrots to blender with 1 cup water. Puree until smooth.
- Store carrots in the fridge for 5 days or freezer for up to a month.
Notes
Nutrition
Did you make this?
Snap a photo and tag @macheesmo so I can see your work.
Carrot Baby Food
Roasting Versus Boiling
When it comes to cooking carrots for a puree like this, you have two easy options: to roast or to boil. It’s a personal choice and both work fine. Personally, I like to roast them. I think the carrots taste better roasted instead of boiled, but there’s no wrong answer.
I used some fun multi-colored organic carrots for this version.
If you’re roasting, just chop them up into about 1-inch pieces. I even left the skins on since they are all going in the blender anyway.
One thing I didn’t do was toss them in olive oil. This would be a normal step for me any time I roast a veggie, but I didn’t want to introduce that to Theo just yet so I just roasted them naked. In a month or two, I’ll remake this and add some oil probably.
Roast the carrots for about 30 minutes at 300 degrees. You don’t want them to take on a lot of caramelization which would be harder to puree. But, they should be super soft.
Then you can just toss them in a blender with some water!
Run that sucker until it’s in a smooth puree. Try to get out as many lumps as possible.
This was my finished blender view. I just love the dark orange color of these carrots.
Carrot Baby Food Storage
Theo likes food as much as the next baby but he isn’t eating all of this in one sitting. I find it easiest to freeze this and keep it in small portions so it thaws quickly.
You can either freeze it in an ice cube tray or just pour it into a freezer bag and use a few chopsticks to space out your portions. Press down on the sticks and it’ll make little creases that you can then later break apart.
The hardest part about this recipe? Getting Theo to hold still while I snapped a picture. The kid hates to be in focus.
I have to say I’m so excited you’re posting baby food recipes. I’m sure some of your readers are less enthused, but our daughter is about to start solids, too, and I want her palate not to be boring. So, hurrah!
Woo! I’d love a copy – a friend of mine is due in just a week and I can’t tell anyone yet that I’m pregnant too… (the Internet doesn’t count. Right?)
Ha! Amazing. Your secret is safe with me and congrats! :)
Our first little one should be making her debut in a week or less, so this is very much a topic of discussion at our house. So the timing is perfect!
Oh you made me smile! I used to cook all of my son’s baby food & he’s graduating from high school this weekend. Your timing was perfect :)
We are finally past the puree stage with kid #2, but he refused to eat rice cereal and I now have a giant container that I only took 1/4 cup out of. Any ideas other than expensive compost?
Hey Heidi! Your best bet might be just to find another family with a baby to donate it too… I’m not sure it would be good for any adult use… ;)
I don’t have babies yet, but my friends are having them left and right. I have always been excited about the idea of homemade baby food.
We’re just exiting baby food territory (my son is 14 months old) so feel free to exclude me from the giveaway, I just wanted to say that I loved making my own baby food–not to mention how much money I saved. My older kids are 9 & 12 and I was shocked how much more baby food was compared to when they were little. I more than paid for the price of my vita-mix with what I wasn’t spending on those little pouches and jars!
I also loved that I was able to do more interesting blends and add a lot of things not found in packaged baby good (favorites were lentils, split peas, quinoa, brown rice & tofu). So you make your own yogurt yet? Whoever makes plain full fat yogurt has figured out that the only people buying are parents of babies and jacked the price up accordingly. I probably save $30-40/month by making it myself with a $20 yogurt maker off amazon.
We are thinking about having our first so this book might help with baby meal planning.
I have a granddaughter expecting and she and her husband love to cook. They would appreciate this!
exciting times!!
We have a little one on the way and could defiantly use this.
Grandchild is getting homemade baby food. She has just about finished the butternut squash and has tasted some of the sweet potato. Her parents have an apple tree so she has also been having apple sauce. It is a whole lot of fun.
But there is that moment when you think the mouth is open, and the child turns and there is now food in the ear. Sigh.
Enjoy
We just started solids too! It’s been fun to experiment with different fruits and veggies! Baby’s favorite so far = green beans!
My first grandchild (a girl!) is due in about 6 weeks. We all look forward to trying our hand at baby food made at home!
We made almost all our baby food from scratch, as well. And our daughter LOVED sweet potoatoes. Too much so, as her nose started turning orange, haha.
I can’t imagine having spent more than $10-$20 on her baby food during her fruit & vegetable stages, although she eventually started going through avocado at a sizeable clip. We just cut each avocado half into about 10 pieces and put each one in an ice cube tray to freeze.
You can freeze avocado?? Does it turn brown when it thaws? This is genius–my 14 month old loves avacado but is really the only one to eat it plain, and I hate to waste it.
My little one has some food allergies, so he & I have had a bit of a limited diet. I’m starting to introduce more foods to him, though, and hope he’ll be able to eat much of what we eat before too long.
My sister in law has a baby on the way, and she loves to kick. I’d love to be able to give this to her.
*** she loves to COOK, not kick. Autocorrect does crazy things sometimes.