I am determined to come out victorious against the hyper-sensitive gag, so I am working on acquiring some tools to assist in that endeavor. In order of likelihood that you have them in your kitchen, my arsenal so far consists of:
* Knife and cutting board: so far, not very useful. But I keep hoping there will come a day where all Addy needs is for her food to be chopped up into bite-sized pieces!
* Mesh strainer: the tool of last resort when I can't deal with trying to feed her one more gaggy bite. The goal is to not use this any more (not for this purpos at least).
* Food processor ("full size" and mini): not really my favorite tools for this stage of the game, though both are certainly useful outside the realm of baby food. By the time things have been chopped small enough, we have purée and not textured food.
* Leftover plastic baby food containers: reduce, reuse, and recycle. They're already the right size for portioning home-made (or at least home-mushed) baby food, and they go into the freezer with no worries.
* Potato ricer: it's quick, it's easy, it goes in the dishwasher and generally comes out clean, it's a good size for mushing up a toddler-sized portion of food for one meal, and it does a descent job of mushing up the food while sifting out some of the extra big offending textures. But it only makes one texture, so I'm thinking its days may be numbered. (If you've never seen one before, a potato ricer is basically a gigantic garlic press.)
* Food mill: it's so old school it's almost cool again. Almost. A pain in the neck to truly get clean some times (food gets caught in the grinding disks really easily) and really too much tool for dealing with a single meal's worth of food, it actually does the best job of achieving texture like the OT would like, and has three grind sizes to choose from. It's also a great tool for making up a big batch of baby food to put up in the freezer. It is, however, more likely than the ricer to be garage-saled in a couple of years. I just have no desire to ever make home-made apple sauce or tomato sauce again, but heavenly whipped potatoes are definitely going to be served again!
