I have a Beaba Babycook (beabausa.com/product-babycook.php) (NOT USED TO COOK BABIES, by the way) that was a gift from my lovely, wonderful and talented cousin. I’ve been using it to make purées for the babies since they were 6 months old. They are now nearly 8 months old, so I’m not yet a pro.

I love the Babycook (NOT USED TO COOK BABIES), but my one (minor) complaint is that it doesn’t really tell you how to purée simple things. It comes with a chart that breaks down some of the common veggies and water levels to add, but that’s about it. The way you use a Babycook (NOT USED TO COOK BABIES) is you fill the water reservoir to either level 1, level 2, or level 3. Then you pour the water in the machine, add the food you want steamed to the basket, pop it in, and set it to steam. Once the food is steamed – about 15 minutes for a level 2 – you then remove the basket and drain out some or all of the water (again, not that well explained), and put the now-steamed food in the bowl and purée. It’s also not clear how much food to make at once. But for all that, it’s very forgiving – experimenting is fun, and with the Beaba, it’s also easy.

I buy my veggies from my local CSA, Canticle Farm, which I have written about before here (in the interest of full disclosure, I am now on the marketing committee at Canticle Farm, and proudly so). I had a quiver of carrots (or whatever that group would be called), and wanted to make carrot purée for the twinsies. Here’s what I did:

Peel and dice 6-7 medium sized carrots

Add water to level 3 (since carrots are so dense), place basket of carrots in the bowl, lock the contraption, and let steam. Stuff and fold diapers while waiting. Wash knife and cutting board. Re-read little instruction booklet from Beaba (they have a cookbook that is probably very thorough, but I don’t have it). Browse baby food cookbooks that I do have.

Carefully remove the bowl from the machine. This, alone, is a challenge. The machine gets very hot, so there isn’t a very good place to hold it. Proceed with caution.

Remove the basket of steamed carrots – there is a special spatula tool included to do this.

Debate how much water to pour away. End up pouring away all but about a teaspoon.

Lock the bowl back onto the machine. It’s still hot.

Dump the carrots into the bowl. Add a teaspoon or so of olive oil. Olive oil helps the beta carotene in the carrots absorb into the babies’ intestines. True story.

Purée until smooth. The purée function is completely custom; it’s like a pulse button on a blender – you simply hold it for as long as you want to purée. I stopped a few times to spatula the carrots of the walls of the bowl.

I wanted to feed the babies the purée immediately, so I removed one portion. The rest amounted to about 6 or 7 ounces of purée. I poured it into an ice cube tray, put that in a sealed Tupperware container, and then put the whole thing in the freezer. Once they were fully frozen (like a day later), I popped them out of the ice cube tray (so I could do this again/make ice cubes) and just left them in the Tupperware.

The carrots were a huge hit, as it turned out.