Have pureed yams forever ruined your baby’s pinstriped pajamas? No worries! With a little persistence, ingenuity, (and possibly vinegar) the garment might just be restored to its original brilliance.

Of course with all of the below stains, the best option is to quickly wet and pre-treat the item so that the stain doesn’t have a chance to dry. If it is dried without your knowing, you can still give the following remedies a try!

Try these simple tricks for specific stains:

• Berries: Boil water, stretch the garment tight over a pan, exposing the stain. Then pour the very hot water down over the stain. If that doesn’t work try mixing vinegar and toothpaste to remove the stain.
• Blood: First soak the clothing in cold salt water and then rub with detergent. If that doesn’t work try applying dish soap, letting it sit for a bit, rinsing thoroughly and letting it dry in the sun.
• Feces: Wash and then let the stain be naturally bleached out by sunlight. If that doesn’t do the trick, try Nature’s Miracle Stain Remover.  There’s no need to use bleach with cloth diapers!
• Grass: First work in some rubbing alcohol and then allow it to dry. Afterwards treat it with detergent and rinse with cold water. If none of those things work, try Bac-Out or Nature’s Miracle Stain Remover.
• Mustard: Mix rubbing alcohol with dish soap and rub into the stain.
• Tomato Sauce: Rub dish soap or dishwasher detergent into the stain and then run cold ice over the stain. Repeat multiple times until the stain works itself out. (I have to share that I managed to cover myself in spaghetti sauce at a lovely restaurant while dining without my children. After many applications of dish soap and ice, the stains came out completely even though they were dried into my clothes.)

What are your favorite stain removal tricks? Do you have any recipes for a homemade stain pre-treatment? Are there stain removal victories you’d like to share?

It started as a wholesome, organic, whole grain finger food for my baby. (I blogged about it here. We even sing the praises of puffs in The Eco-nomical Baby Guide!) I would sometimes eat a puff or two. Or three. Or a whole bowl full. Or multiple bowls full. After a few months, I had to admit I had a problem. I thought about puffs constantly. I panicked if I started to run low.  Soon I was going though four bags a week.

Rice puffs are the perfect finger food for a baby. My particular weakness, however, were the kamut puffs!

After three years of constant “puffing,” I finally cut back. No, I did not quit cold turkey; I was not strong enough for that. First I went four days without puffing—not once! That was a big step for me—one I was not willing to make for three years. I decided to go on a “healthy eating” kick and that involved more protein, fewer carbs. After the initial withdrawal period, I found myself better able to control my puff urges. Now I’m down to one—okay, or maybe two—small bowls a day.

So do I still recommend Nature’s Path Organic Puff cereals as a finger food? Yes, with reservations. Just learn from my mistakes so you don’t find yourself battling the urge to eat puff after delicious puff.

It may sound difficult, but making homemade organic baby food has tremendous benefits for baby, the environment and your budget.  Also, it is by no means difficult to plop cooked food into a blending device and swirl it up.  Both Rebecca and I have conquered the art of baby purees despite the fact that both of us felt totally overwhelmed as new mothers for the first year.  Have you given homemade baby food a whirl?  If so, what are your standbys and how did you get started?  What challenges have you faced?  We find that like many other green lifestyle pursuits, most people gain the confidence to make the shift when they have friends or family who have tried it before.  Hopefully our readers can provide that online community for each other.  Thanks for sharing your baby food secrets!  And for more recipes and tips, check out our book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide: Down to Earth Ways for Parents to Save Money and the Planet.

While I’m off on vacation, I thought I’d rerun this old post from the summer of 2008!

Joy’s popsicle post provided me with a burst of inspiration: Could I sneak vegetables into my daughter’s diet by disguising them in a tasty frozen treat?  The answer is yes.  Here’s my groundbreaking recipe:

Strawberry Spinach Popsicles

Pint of very ripe strawberries (overripe is okay)
2-3 cups of carefully washed spinach leaves
1 TBS honey (or more, to taste)

Place the strawberries in the blender and fill the remainder of the blender with spinach leaves.  Add honey and puree until smooth.  Pour into popsicle molds.  (Yields 2 cups liquid)

I invented this recipe and gave the strange-looking brown popsicle to my daughter.  She took one lick and said, “Yum, yum!”  Then she ate the whole thing, making quite a mess in the process.  Of course I sampled this brown concoction myself.  It really does not taste of spinach at all-it’s just pleasantly strawberry-flavored.

Now, I know that disguising vegetables in other foods is controversial.  When Jessica Seinfeld’s book Deceptively Delicious came out, I read reviews from critics who claimed that lying to children about what they were eating would result in bitterness and mistrust in their parents as they grew older and wiser.  This seems a little far-fetched to me.  Besides, I did not lie to Audrey; I just handed her a popsicle and she ate it.  I hope she grows to love normally-prepared vegetables very soon, but in the meantime, I’m glad I found a way to sneak some greens into her summer confections.

Have you given up on peanut butter? I am so-o-o glad I didn’t read that doctors are recommending pregnant and breastfeeding women to avoid peanuts when I was pregnant five years ago.  As a vegetarian, I live off of peanut butter!

Once my daughter was eating solid foods, I waited patiently until she was two before introducing nuts. (Which was the recommendation at the time.) She was really underweight for a while there, and it was frustrating to withhold peanut butter for so long. I know I gave her almond butter first, but now I can’t remember when I introduced it.

Has anyone tried feeding babies sunflower seed butter? All the peanut butter alternatives out there are so much more expensive, but it seems like a good way to get some protein and calories into a young child’s diet. What do you think?

Is the baby registry list making you dizzy?  Are you wondering how best to launder dirty cloth diapers?  Do you need baby food recipes? Have you had more than three hours of sleep in the last two days?   Are you trying to squeeze more organic produce into your grocery budget?   Does pumping breast milk at work seem totally overwhelming?

We’ve been there!  But now that our kids are older, we have to be reminded of just what would be helpful to our readers.  What are your latest victories and what are your biggest challenges? I’ve shared my weight loss dilemma this week, but there are bound to be issues of far greater consequence. (Like the critical goal of getting enough food and rest in those first few months!)  Please give us ideas for upcoming posts this summer and we’ll personally do our best to address your needs.

Let me get this out of the way: I am going to recommend a plastic product! Egads! I searched high and low for a non-plastic bento box for my daughter, but I ended up with this Sassy baby bento box, which is BPA-free. For the last year or so, I’ve been packing her lunches for daycare in these little containers:

I love it! Here’s why. Before I broke down and bought this, I was packing her lunch in various containers, which was unwieldy. The main reason I like it is because it makes creating her meals easier. Something about having three little containers helps me focus on food options. I might put apple slices in the big compartment, cheese cubes in one of the small ones, and crackers in the other one. Or half of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the large container and small carrot sticks in one small container, raisins in the other.

Downsides: The spoon is flat and useless, so I don’t use it. Some reviewers on Amazon complained that the containers are leaky if you put pureed foods in them. I have never put leaky things in the box, so this isn’t an issue for me.

The box is perfect for a small child with a minimal appetite. My daughter rarely finishes everything in her lunch, but an older or bigger child would probably want a more substantial lunch box. But I highly recommend the Sassy bento box for the preschool set!

It hasn’t been a banner year for organic food at my house.  Overwhelmed by rutabaga and kale, I quit our CSA while I was eight months pregnant.  My son needed interaction, my feet needed rest, and the idea of peeling and sautéing veggies after a full day of teaching made me want to weep with exhaustion.  With the birth of our second child, the sleep loss continued and seemed to wipe out all my dreams of canning hundreds of pounds of peaches and growing all my own produce.

Finally, we’re back on track!  This summer I plan on picking heaps of local produce and freezing and canning up a storm.  Our garden is already in and I have dreams of adding a raised bed if I can find a way to get more cedar planks home in our small cars.  Since I’m hoping to cut way back on work next year, I hope to also do a fall garden and extend our growing season as long as possible.

We even join a CSA again too.  It was a wonderful way to get our whole family eating better and to support local farmers.  What are your summer dreams for beautiful, healthful food?

Do you whip it up in your blender or fork mash it? (Joy loves her blender, Rebecca does not!) Do you steam, boil, or bake it?  There are millions of ways to prepare delightful meals for baby and we’d love to hear some of your favorites.  Looking for ideas?  Our book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide features some easy recipes for healthy homemade purees. We’d love to hear what you do!

Strangely, I owned a hand blender before I had a set of dishes or silverware. My aunt and uncle gave one to me one Christmas when I was still in my early twenties, living a carefree existence with minimal possessions. I couldn’t find the exact model, but it looks similar to this Sunny Morning by Kalorik Stick Mixer. I made some great single-serving milk shakes, small batches of pesto, pureed creamy soups right on the stove top, and created many other tasty concoctions over the years.

Flash forward to 2006, when I discovered that an immersion blender was more than an appliance for a free-wheeling single woman. It was perfect for whipping up smaller batches of baby food, when I didn’t want to clean out my entire food processor or food mill. Say I had a cup of black beans or a single sweet potato or two bananas, for example—I just put them in the cup that comes with the appliance and blended them away.

If you don’t do much cooking and therefore don’t want to shell out hundreds of dollars for a food processor you’ll never use, an immersion blender might be all you need. You can buy the Silex Immersion hand blender or the Toastmaster Immersion hand blender for just around $13. The Kitchenaid hand blender or the Cuisinart hand blenders come in different colors and offer more attachments for about $50. If you want to get really fancy, why not try the Robot Coupe Turbo Power mixer for just $760.00? Actually, I am not sure this is even for mixing food. My modest immersion blender has worked just fine for at least fifteen years, so there’s no need to go nuts with the fanciest model on the market!

Thus concludes my series on “gadgets with which to pulverize baby food.” For more exciting reading, check out my posts on using a food processor and food mill. Also, weigh in on the great Green Baby Guide duel of 2010: pro-blender vs. anti-blender.