10 Things to do With Baby Food

If you bought baby food by the case or stocked your freezer with homemade baby food only to find that your baby graduated to finger foods faster than you could use it up, what did you do with all that extra baby food? You can donate the unopened jars of baby food--that's what I do with a lot of the meats--or you can get creative in your day-to-day cooking. Baby food isn't just for babies... it's great for toddlers or for mixing into your own meals!

Below are 10 tried-and-true ways to use up those jars of mixed veggies, bananas, squash, and carrots.

1. Add a jar or two of carrots, squash, or sweet potatoes to powdered macaroni and cheese instead of butter.
2. Smear squash, sweet potatoes, or fruit puree on the bread before adding the peanut butter and jelly.
3. Make banana bread or replace the banana in a baked good with a few jars of banana puree.
4. Feed your toddler the pureed fruit. It's the same as applesauce, but it has fewer preservatives and less sugar in many instances.
5. Spread it on crackers or a rice cake.
6. Add pureed green beans to guacamole - it will reduce the fat content, and you won't even notice it.
7. Add a jar of banana and a jar of sweet potato in place of the butter or oil in your pancake recipe.
8. Mix pureed tropical fruit into a smoothie.
9. Mix sweet potato with brown sugar and swirl it with plain yogurt. Top with cinnamon. (Or swirl any fruit-flavored baby food into your yogurt.)
10. Add any of the orange veggies (carrots, sweet potatoes, squash, or mixed veggies) to a curry dish. It will thicken the sauce and give it great flavor.

Jeanie Rose over at Traditional Foods wrote a great post about making your own baby food from butternut squash. That would be perfect to use in lots of the ways I described above. Check out her video!

For more delicious recipes, check out: