Day Seventy One: Roasted Banana Baby Food Disaster

My daughter's first tooth arrived today.

Baby C is already six months old and I'm flabbergasted by how quickly time flies. :tear:

I also ran out of baby food today, so I had to visit the grocery.  I had not really thought about it before, but baby food can be expensive.  For what I spend on baby food each month, I could feed a small African nation.  At least the baby food comes in handy three-ounce serving sizes.

It occurred to me that Martha would not buy baby food.  She would make her own baby food from the food that she has grown in her garden, grown from seeds she foraged in the woods.  I don't grow food in my garden (with the exception of some herbs) but I can still try to make baby food.  So I grabbed a bag of carrots, a bunch of bananas and headed home.

This being my third child, it is not the first time I've tried to make baby food.  For some reason, the steamed veggies I've made in the past wasn't a big hit with my other children, so I wasn't encouraged to make more. They prefer the store-bought baby food.  Perhaps this is because the baby food I buy them reads like a gourmet menu:  roasted apples, baked sweet potatoes with white beans, sweet baby carrots with apple and mango, pasta with lentil Bolognese, and summer squash with Yukon gold potatoes and parmesan.  It got me thinking that maybe I should try something better than steamed carrots...

Martha has a few recipes for baby food.  But instead of following one of them, I read her  guidelines for baby food, and set out to try something a little different.  I decided instead of steaming the food, I would roast it.  Roasting brings out the sweetness and flavors in food, so I figured Baby C would prefer it.  So onto the pan went the carrots.  And a banana too.  Why not?

Bananas and carrots, mid-roast:

After the bananas and carrots had roasted at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes, I took out the bananas.  They smelled heavenly.  Like fresh-from-the-oven banana bread.  They tasted heavenly too.  The carrots were still pretty hard, so I put them back in the oven to finish cooking.

I put the roasted bananas in a little processor and pureed them until they were nice and smooth:

This is the result.
Yes, it is brown and scary-looking.
Did I mention it smelled really good?

It was about this time that I noticed something.  Something burning.

The carrots.

Well, it wasn't the carrots exactly, but the sugary liquid from the banana that I had cooked with the carrots.  The banana liquid had burned in the pan and caused the carrots to smell like burned bananas.

Humph.

Well, the bananas were still good.  Baby C will love those. :fingerscrossed:

:pauseforbigreveal:

I would like to tell you that Baby C loved the roasted bananas.  My ego and pocketbook were both hoping for a success today.   But, I'm pretty sure Baby C did not enjoy the roasted bananas.   In fact, every bite I fed her elicited a face of utter disgust.  You would have thought I was feeding her a lemon. :scratcheshead:  I don't get it.

Hmmm.  Maybe I should have started back at foraging for seeds in the woods.