Chicken Baby Food

[ferretfreke]

Is chicken baby food just boiled/blended boneless chicken? Does anyone know? I want to make my own because to make my foster baby's soup I'm going through about 10 jars a week. I think a $1 per jar for 2.5 ounces is ridiculous. If I make it myself should I use both dark and white meat? The label just says the ingredients contain chicken, water, and cornstarch. Would the cornstarch be necessary?

[Heather]

That's what I used when I made my baby food . Think about it, what would you use if you were making real, baby food for a baby.....Boiled chicken, the juices from the chicken through it in the food processor, puree. If you want to make it even better for your ferret, throw in some liver, boil it with the chicken....throw all of it into the blender. You can also add some finely ground egg shells when you throw it all in the blender. You've then got a completely balanced ferret baby food . You may also want to add a taurine capsule but only after the food cools and only to the stuff that you're going to feed in the next 24 hrs. Not stuff you're going to freeze (the taurine will deteriorate if frozen). I think I've covered all that I put in my baby food.
ciao
ciao

[Kerit]

Heather, I'd be interested in the details of efficient chicken-boiling... for how long? What size pieces do you cut it into first? And so forth. I know I have a blender coming my way, and my girl's favorite thing in the world is baby food, so I'd like to try my own!

[Heather]

You can just use a whole boiler fryer, cut it up and boil. Depending on what you want as results, I usually put it on for the day and let is simmer away, adding water as needed. If I want to take it the next step (until the bones are soft) then I will boil for several hours. Either way just boil until the meat falls off and then throw it in the blender. It depends on your blender as to what size pieces you will need to cut it up in. It's really very simple. It's more time consuming than actually difficult.
You may want to take a hammer to the leg bones so that the marrow boils out of the bones.
ciao

[ferretfreke]

Thank you Heather. I have to try to make it as close to the jarred stuff as possible. Hunter is so picky and still sometimes difficult to get him to eat enough, that if anything is different he wont eat. I used turkey baby food last time because it has more fat and he needed a lot of encouragement to eat it. The baby food is only a small percentage of his soup, so I didn't think he'd notice that much. I was wrong. That boy is hard to keep happy sometimes.