Homemade Brown Rice

I've been reading this book, Super Baby Food, to find out how to make homemade baby food. The most frequent piece of advice we got about having a baby is "Don't buy baby food!" I'm hoping to find an easy way to work our meals into baby food, but I am anticipating a few problems:

1. Popcorn and nachos probably don't blend too well.
2. We like to eat spicy foods. Food in baby food jars don't list many spices for ingredients. I'm assuming there's a reason for that.

We have a blender that works great for margaritas, but not much else. We have a food processor that I use for making pesto, but I frequently try to use it wrong and have a plastic part in there that shouldn't be, which is why it's kind of chewed up. We have an immersion blender which is useful for blending soups, and I could see it working on baby food too.

So, for his half birthday (6 months) we fed him his first solid food: Earth's Best brand organic brown rice powder, mixed with breast milk. After a few days of this we realized the reason he was making faces at it was because it was quite cold. After warming up the milk to the normal temperature, we would mix it with the rice powder in a bowl from the cupboard. The bowls in the cupboard are like refrigerator temperature, so they immediately made the food cold. We are now either warming the bowl up or heating up the food after it's mixed, this has seemed to help.

Then we made brown rice for dinner and I thought I would try to serve him the real thing! In the book, she suggests blending dry brown rice for 2 minutes and then cooking it. I thought, if I'm making it anyway, I might as well make the rice first, then blend a little bit for our little grub. This experiment FAILED. What happened was that I discovered how to make a ball of solid starch. It was like the consistency of bean paste, if you've ever had that, but more gummy. It was practically a tennis ball sized piece of sticky gum. And you can imagine how hard that was to clean off the blender blades. Next, I tried, sticking the gum ball in the food processor, thinking that might work better. What that did was made even more blades to clean starch ball off of.

I hope you weren't expecting this blog to be helpful. I guess it can be helpful in a "here's what NOT to do" sort of way. I'll keep experimenting and report back. In conclusion, it's nice to have that box of rice powder on hand in case your attempts at making homemade baby stuff don't work out so well. But the price difference? $4 for a box of 1/2 lb organic brown rice cereal vs. $1 for 1/2 lb bulk organic brown rice in bulk at New Pi Coop.