 Well with Spring, I'm thinking about being here. Farmers markets theoretically will be soon open with fresh produce perfect for everyone in your house from mama to baby. And joining me this morning are local authors, blending bloggers and new parents, Shalva and Lenny Gale. Good morning guys. Good morning. New parents, new kids. How many? Just one, four, one. Just the one for, oh, so like brand new parents. Real new. Oh wow, so you're just getting into this whole baby food excitement from an experimental basis. First and foremost you guys are all for blending up and making your own baby food. Tell us why folks might want to consider doing that. Sure, so there's a few reasons. One is that you're in control. So you know exactly what's going in, fresh local produce that's in season and you also know exactly what's not going in. And to us that's the most important is there's no additives, there's no flavorings, there's no preservatives if you're doing it yourself. Secondly it's so much healthier for the baby. If you're using local fresh seasonal food it's packed full of nutrients. And third and I think this one is a little bit surprising to people, we think that it's healthier for mama. And the reason is that you take so much time taking care of yourself when you're pregnant and when you're nursing. And then when your kid starts eating food you kind of lose sight of that. So instead of going to the grocery store and picking up a pouch or a jar of baby food and then maybe like a frozen dinner for yourself. Instead we're sending you to the farmer's market to get produce for the whole family. And by doing that, yeah, you're encouraging the rest of the family to eat on a healthier level. Exactly. Whose idea was this? Was this a joint effort or who thought of this idea first? Of baby food in general. Baby was ready. They say that baby food helps baby sleep through the night, so at a certain point. This was a selfish motivation as well. Yes. Yeah. Can you see it? Yeah. So it was, and this is kind of what we do. We, you have a choice and you can go to the grocery store and you can see jars and packets and you can see that they're there for a couple bucks and it doesn't look like they're, oh that's a couple dollars, but over the course of a month it really adds up quickly. Oh it does, especially as they start to eat more and more. Exactly. And especially when you can make your own easily at home for pennies on the dollar. So again this is a money saving feature as well. So you don't need to spend a lot of money when you do this, when you make your own. You're not adding a bunch of stuff. It's just essentially going to the farmer's market, finding what you like. Do you have to do other things or add stuff to just a vegetable or a fruit or is it literally just pulping the heck out of something? So at first it's really just blending one or two ingredients together. So four months all he's gonna be eating is a couple of things together. You can start to get really creative and mix some stuff. So yes, you might wanna start getting creative with it. We're excited to get creative about it to give him some interesting things to try to expand his palate a little bit. But the only prep that you need is to steam your vegetables. Steaming is by far the best way to keep as many nutrients as you can in them. So it took me four minutes to steam the peas that we're gonna use today. All right go ahead and did you wanna blend something up for us? Yeah we'll show you, yeah. So are we gonna just make peas? Are we gonna do something fun with it? So I've got my sous chef here. We are making a really simple, simple one today because like I said we've got a four month old and he can really only handle one thing. Right and you don't wanna introduce too many things at the same time. Exactly. So for allergies you wanna make sure to keep it simple but you can get really, really interesting at a certain point here. So I've got peas which have been steamed. They're seasonal right now. You can go to when the farmer's markets are available to us. Dump those in there. Dump them in, yeah go. So it's two cups of steamed peas and then we've got a half a cup of a non-dairy milk of your choice. So you can use almond milk, cashew milk or you can use breast milk or formula here too depending. So we've got a half cup of that. Lenny's gonna blend it up. Just for about 10 seconds. Super easy, high powered blender. This is a Vitamix. This is what we use at home. There it goes. And that's it. Now, you said you used just a, was that an almond milk you used in there? So we used an almond milk. He was likely used expressed breast milk at home. A lot of people will use formula in here too. So we would probably use the tamper that goes with it too. Yeah, you wanna squish everything else. I have a tendency to rock things back and forth when I use the blender. That's probably not good for the blend. So this is what it ends up looking like is this bright, fresh, vibrant green color. You can tell it has nutrients in it because of the color. Did you make, what was this made with? Was this made with almond milk? Almond milk, yes. No worries. Just making sure. Extra nutrients there. And then, what do you think? It's peas. It's peas. You know, for an adult, I'd say maybe add a little salt. Right, exactly. But that's not bad. It's not terrible. It's very clean. Yeah, it's not bad. I like that. It's just steamed and then we also have a sweet potato carrot one, which is, it's sweet naturally because of the carrots, but also very vibrant, full of nutrients. Now, you'll make this stuff, do you make this stuff once a week and you keep it in the fridge or do you put the stuff in the freezer? So that's a great question. So a lot of people will make a huge batch and then they'll freeze it. So Leni, do you wanna kinda show them the process? Well, look, we'll have about 10 or 12 seconds left. Oh, do it, okay. How long will it last in the freezer if you can do it then? Three months, which is about how long you're gonna be doing maybe three days anyway. Oh, I was gonna say, yeah, then you can make it once and then you just say, all right, maybe. I'm done forever, yeah. There's a carrot popsicle if you're not so careful. Well, guys, we run out of time, but thank you very much. No, thank you. Shalva and Leni, thank you for joining us this morning and for all of these recipes, including, guess what, they've got a book. It's called The Perfect Mix. You can go to their website, their blog. It's lifeisnoyoke.com. Lifeisnoyoke.com