I have made my own baby food and found that it is only worth the effort when I turned the grown up meal into something the baby could eat. I just used a mini-prep food processor to pulverize the food - whatever it was - into the right texture for the baby. It was a great way to get the baby used to eating what we ate and gave me the confidence of knowing where the food came from and what was in it.

However, I never found that making batches of baby food was worth the trouble. First of all, if you take apples, for example, it takes a lot of boiled apples to make one jar of apple sauce. Plus, it takes a lot of time to prepare - then you need to freeze it in little cubes, date it, figure out an expiration date, store it, and then remember to use it before it expires. Not worth the hassle! My youngest child never once ate a jar of store-bought baby food (because he refused, not because I'm a control freak), but I also never prepared any ahead of time for him. I just mastered the process of getting our meals ready to be pulverized for his toothless pallette. And believe me - he never went hungry!