Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Basicly, this device does an excellent job at making baby food and every new parent should seriously consider getting it. It does however, have a few minor flaws. If you skip to the end of this review, I'll detail a list of pros and cons. Otherwise, read on for a detailed description of how it works and where some minor issues lie. ----------------------------------- My wife and I use this device all the time. To cook the food, you place what you want steamed in to a slotted cup, pour in a "guestimated" amount of water, put the vented dome on it and press start. This thing cooks by heating a little hot plate in the water resevoir and just continuing to boil away until there's no more water. There's a clever little catch pan to keep all of the water from just falling back in to the hot plate compartment. This catch pan can and does overflow, especially if you're cooking "wet" foods such as yellow summer squash. So the water resevoir really needs a wipe down after every use. Not a big deal, the plastic and the metal hot plate are both easily cleaned and debris doesn't really stick to them. So the steam function requires a little playing with to decide what water amounts work best for different foods, but it works quite well. The box and manual both claim that the steamer compartment can also function as a bottle warmer. They lie! Technicaly, this works. It just works very poorly. It tends to take far far too long and the water resevoir needs emptied when you're done. This requires unplugging the device and hauling it to the sink. Just skip this feature all together and you'll be much happier. ---The blender. This side is essentially just a Magic Bullet that's been repackaged. You have to be carefull about adding liquid to the stuff you've steamed. This little blender, much like a full sized blender, is going to struggle on thick substances like steamed sweet potatoes. Just add water or milk if it's struggling and try not to expect too much out of the little rubber clutch that spins the blades. A lot of reviews on this sight make a complaint about the gasket or the clutch not holding up. I'm not sure what these parents are blending, but I'd be willing to bet that they are simply overburdening the blender. Take it easy and this thing's going to last. ---As a side note: USE ICE CUBE TRAYS!!! So the wife and I tried some cheap, disposable 2oz plastic containers to store our food in the freezer. They'd shatter very easily. We started looking at various baby-specific food storage and were rather aghast at the prices. Well, my wife read a review which suggested dishing the food in to some ice cube trays and just emptying those in to labeled ziploc bags. This little tid-bit of information has saved us countless dollars and headaches. Now we just load a few cubes in to a bowl, maybe even mixing and matching, and zap that in the microwave. Yes, we check the temp and have found that about 1min 15sec is perfect for 5-7 cubes. Now for the review breakdown: -------------------------------- PROS: ---Steams quickly with a "set it and forget it" feature that lets you walk away. ---Has a catch pan in the steamer that lets you add the nutrient-rich drips back in to the baby food. Yay! ---Beeper lets you know when steam resevoir is empty and automatically turns off heating element. You'll want to wait another minute or two, letting it cool. ---Entire device is rather stain resistant and foods wipe off with little to no scrubbing. ---Blender is fairly sturdy and, providing it has enough liquid, blends food to a smooth consistency quickly. ---Blender cleans easily and is dishwasher safe. CONS: ---The amount of water needed for each food is a bit of an art. There's plenty of room for error. Under-steamed? add water and go again. Over-steamed? lesson learned, baby will still eat it. You learn quickly, so this is a very minor complaint. ---There should be warnings about not making food too thick. If you try to run the blender with thick foods, you will break it! lastly... ---THIS IS NOT A BOTTLE WARMER!!! regardless what packaging and manual may say, this is a terrible feature and is only added to the labels to make the machine appear more impressive. I'm providing a 5-star review anyway, because I love this thing and pretend that this feature doesn't exist. If you do the same, you should be quite pleased with this product.