My babies will be 9 months old tomorrow (gosh! where has the time gone?) and have still not had a drop of Purity (our local jarred baby food, for the non-South Africans) pass their lips.

I will admit – I nearly, nearly cracked this weekend when we had two SPECTACULAR power failures, but I didn’t.

Still, there was NO WAY I was going to be spending R6 per baby for a jar of baby food, 2 – 3 times a day.

After all, I have twins (my new excuse for being cheap )

So I decided to try my hand at making my own.

It’s a lot easier than you think especially if you cook them in batches instead of cooking daily.

We bought a butternut squash for R12,78 (let’s not forget the 78c ) and it made all these portions.

6 portions for Connor and 6 for Kendra.

That’s at least 9 jars of baby food = R54

Saving = R41

You can save even more money when you use cheaper vegetables like sweet potato.

Another way I like to save money on our food is this – every month there is one week (happens to be this week) where I cook from the freezer and pantry.

I’m forced to get creative using strange combinations of whatever cans and bits of frozen food I have, all to empty it out.

Sometimes these strange combinations work really well, like a potato bake I now regularly make with a can of sweet corn stirred in.

How do you save money on food?

I am soooo not a fan of the baking mess although I do love to bake.

Actually, it’s the eating part of the baking I really love

So to avoid the kitchen looking like this every time I feel like baking something…

I measure out 3 sets of ingredients.

I then label the outside of the containers with masking tape so I know which container has which dry ingredients.

It’s not very difficult because I usually only bake muffins and these oatmeal cookies.

Then when I feel the urge to bake, all I do is get one of these containers, add the wet ingredients and load the dough onto the baking trays.

Baking then takes about 10 minutes so saves me LOTS of time and best of all, NO MESS!

What are your best baking tips?

P.S. I was all done with Christmas baking but then on Christmas Eve I found these Cowboy cookies on Bakerella’s site. They made me absolutely DROOL so I rushed home from work and got baking. And they’re delicious.

That could explain the extra weight I’m carrying…

As with almost anything though, I can’t seem to follow a recipe exactly as is so I’ve changed it a bit to suit our household (I weed out ingredients I’m not likely to have in my pantry).

P.P.S. Why is it that when you go into a homeware store you suddenly see the CUTEST baking utensils that, until that very moment, you didn’t know you absolutely had to have? You’ll be happy to know I was very strong and bravely walked out the store.