Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Homemade Toddler Yogurt

From the time Charlotte was a baby I've made all of her food. When it was baby food, making it myself was both cheaper and less wasteful (no hundreds of little glass jars). Now it's still cheaper to make what I can, but it's also healthier since I can go the Jessica Seinfeld route and sneak in vegetables whenever possible.

In addition to some organic tomato soup (supplemented with rice cereal to make it thicker and therefore possible for her to eat), and some of Jessica's homemade macaroni and cheese with pureed beans and cauliflower in our freezer, we also have yogurt.

Charlotte eats yogurt every morning and I've tried all kinds of flavor combinations, but this most recent one has a lot of sweet potatoes in it, so I think this will be the final recipe for a while.


Apple & Sweet Potato Yogurt



Start with a large container of whole milk organic yogurt. Line a strainer with cheesecloth, and let the yogurt drain out all of the excess liquid using a set up similar to the picture. (If you don't drain the liquid out you'll have to add in almost a box of baby rice cereal to get the right consistency)




Excess liquid.




Cook a bunch of sweet potatoes and make homemade applesauce.


Mix the yogurt, sweet potatoes, and apples together. Add whatever other ingredients you'd like: cinnamon, nutmeg, ground flax seed, baby oatmeal, etc. Don't get too picky about any of it. I added enough applesauce until it tasted more like apple yogurt and a little less like sweet potato yogurt. Be sure to keep the consistency fairly thick - first of all because it will get soupier in the freezing and thawing process, and second of all because toddlers are messy and do much better with thicker yogurt.

Pour into muffin tins, freeze, empty into large freezer bag.



Ta-Da!


According to my calculations, each serving of yogurt is $0.50, as opposed to the $0.62 per serving of the apple sweet potato organic yogurt in the store. But more importantly, that yogurt has about 1 teaspoon of the fruit and vegetable mixture at the bottom, and this recipe is about 50% fruit and vegetables. hi-YAH!

Cost aside, getting toddlers to eat their fruits and vegetables can be a stressful pain in the ass and this helps make it SO much easier. Try it and let me know what other recipes or flavor combinations you come up with!


** CLICK HERE for an updated use on this recipe!!**




2 comments:

Strongmama said...

I wish I could get S to eat yogurt. She ate it for about 2 weeks and that was that. She won't drink homemade smoothies either. But she has no trouble with ice cream! Maybe I should try a sweet potato ice cream... Luckily she's a pretty good veggie eater on her own. The kid requests broccoli at dinner!

Sarah Berry said...

Broccoli goes over pretty well here, too. Especially if there's ketchup to dip it in!

She's a fickle one though, one day something is deemed edible, one day it's not. Luckily the yogurt has held strong though.

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