Semi-Homemade Baby Yogurt
Lily loves yogurt. No, she REALLY loves it. She could eat a container of YoBaby at every meal and never complain. And why should she? It's delicious! Trust me. But it can get expensive, and when you're going through as much as we do, I figured I might as well try to mix up some of my own. After all, if you are looking for organic, whole milk yogurt, your options are very limited (which is probably why it costs so much). And the semi-homemade version worked out really well!
Also, by using your own fruits, you can make any flavor combo that you want. We tend to buy YoBaby at BJ's because it is the cheapest place, but they only sell vanilla and banana (kinda blah). The strawberry/blueberries combo was a big hit when I combined them for my yogurt experiment. If berries aren't in season, then feel free to use frozen. But with today's grocery stores, there's usually pretty decent fresh fruit available (shipping in non-local fruit is never ideal, but since frozen fruit isn't local either, I went with fresh).
I packed it up into individual containters to send to daycare:
And she liked it! (This is an old picture of Lily, but I couldn't pass up sharing those baby blues.)
Semi-Homemade Baby Yogurt
4 cups of berries, cleaned 2 Tbsp. honey (use sugar if your baby is under a year old) 32 ounce container of plain, whole milk yogurt
Combine the berries and the honey in a pot and cook over medium heat until the juices come out of the fruit (about 15-20 minutes), stirring occasionally. Put the mixture through a fine mesh strainer to get rid of any seeds. Cool in the fridge for at least half an hour.
Mix the fruit with the yogurt and serve! It is great to break it up into individual containers, or you can also fit most of it back into the original yogurt container.