No more pureed meat?

I bought a beef chuck roast at the farmer's market last week for baby food. I can't bring myself to buy the jars of meat. For one thing it's heinously expensive. For another, it smells worse than cat food and I thought canned cat food was one of the worst "food" scents ever.

The first meat I processed for Sprout was a chicken I'd made in the crock pot. I put the frozen chicken in the bottom of the pot, covered it with chicken broth, and set it on high for several hours. When the meat fell off the bones I figured it was ready and I ran some of the dark meat through the food processor with some of the broth. There was probably more broth than chicken, but it was a fairly smooth consistency. A little sandy, but not too bad. I made sure to mix it with the fruit and a little bit of cereal to smooth it all out and we had success.

I'd read something that said veal was a good early meat choice because of it's mild flavor. So I went to Whole Foods and bought the humanely raised veal. It was ground and I wanted it to be tender, so I boiled it. Probably not a good choice. Then I decided to try pureeing the veal in a blender instead of the food processor. The texture was pretty nasty, but I was hopeful. I again mixed it with some fruit and a little bit of cereal, but it wasn't enough. Sprout will eat veal if she's really hungry, but if she's not, she spits it.

So back to the chuck roast. I once again made it in the crock pot with beef bouillon paste, water, and onions. It was extremely tender - the bigger eaters had it with mushroom gravy (or it would have been gravy if I could make it, but it was more au jus than anything) - and Sprout just devoured it. I also served chunks of sauteed zucchini and canned peaches and she started out liking those, but at the end only wanted small shreds of chuck roast. It's truly amazing how strong that little tongue can be when she's launching food out of her mouth.

I was going to puree the chuck roast, but since she likes the pieces so much and she seems to handle them ok, I think I'm just going to freeze 1/2 ounce portions in ice cube trays.

What was frustrating for me was feeding her roast while I was eating more zucchini. I'd devoured my portion of beef and since I'm trying to reduce my meat consumption and increase the veggies, I finished off the zucchini. It was ok, but it wasn't beef roast!