When planting the garden this spring, the DW and I thought it was a safe bet to go heavy on peas, carrots, and green beans given Peanut’s diet. So far, we missed on the peas – Peanut doesn’t care for them pureed and though she loves to pick them up and eat them whole, her stomach can’t handle digesting the skin on them quit yet. (No worries, there’s plenty of room in the freezer so they won’t go to waste.) If the carrots turn out, we expect them to be a hit – Peanut loves cooked carrots and the rest of the kiddos will eat them raw faster than I can wash them.

As for the green beans, though we’re currently picking green beans by the bucket, I think we underestimated how many we might need. The main staple of Peanut’s diet is still her green bean shake that we started her on this winter.

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The “recipe” has changed slightly over the last few months, but the shake is still mainly green beans – so much so, that until recently, it was a common practice for me to stop by the grocery store and (almost) clean them out of green bean baby food once a week (I didn’t have the heart to take the last one or two.) That is, until the last few weeks.

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We’re now picking over 2 gallons of green beans every other day. It’s become a nightly routine around here to put the kids to bed and then start to clean and cook beans. Since Peanut will be on her green bean shake into the foreseeable future, we haven’t messed around with trying to can any of the beans. Instead, they’re cooked until soft and then straight to the blender to be pureed.

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We normally have to add just a bit of water to get the beans to “baby food” consistency. Then it’s poured into ice cube trays and placed in the freezer for a few hours to freeze.

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Once frozen, the beans are removed from the trays and put in freezer bags. (The DW has gotten pretty good at knowing exactly how many cubes she needs to thaw out the day before we need them.)

If you want to make a big pile of green beans disappear in a hurry throw them in a blender. If you want to make them disappear even faster, start calculating how many ounces of pureed green beans Peanut consumes in a week. We have a slightly larger standard blender – the last graduation mark is at 56 ounces. Conveniently, that’s exactly what it takes for one week of shakes.