As it turns out, I was a little over zealous on the food-making front because Nicole preferred jarred baby food over any of the purees I made. I gave up my homemade baby food dreams in favor of Nicole's beloved store bought purees and breathed a sigh of relief that I had one less person to prepare food for each day. I nestled the cookbooks next to the other cookbooks I lovingly keep on my kitchen shelves, thinking that I would return to them soon. Jarred baby purees turned into soft fruits, vegetables and grains and I surprised myself by not needing a baby-specific cookbook after all.
I was surprised to realize that Nicole can eat and enjoy the majority of the food Shawn and I eat. In order to pull this off, there are a few guiding principles that I stick to when I'm menu planning. Obviously there are exceptions to every rule, but for the most these are the principles that have kept our family dinners pleasant and healthy for everyone.
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| Mixing up cornbread for dinner |
Tender meat = easy to chew.
Once Nicole started eating regular meals with us I learned in a big hurry that the meats I slow cooked like Shredded Mexican Chicken or Greek Pulled Pork were significantly easier for Nicole to chew with her limited teeth or sore gums than anything I baked, sauted or grilled. The tender and bite-sized nature of browned ground meat was also an automatic winner. Now that Nicole has almost all of her teeth we do grill meat more than we used to, but if Nicole is having a particularly picky stretch of meals then I quickly revert back to tender proteins.
Finger food = independence.
My neighbor Stacey went through this stage where feeding her daughter table food required so much of her time and energy that she didn't have time to feed herself. Stacey started rapidly loosing weight and when the people around her started noticing her only explanation was that feeding her daughter had become a full-time job. Thankfully, family dinner guaranteed that I got to eat at least one proper meal a day even when we went through a similar phase with Nicole. It's hard not to be frustrated with the challenge of feeding your baby while attempting to simultaneously feed yourself but there is hope just around the corner! For us, that very hands on phase almost completely went away when Nicole developed her pincer grasp. By incorporating finger foods such as legumes into our regular meal plan I know that Nicole has at least one part of the meal that she can eat independently. Nicole happily consumes legumes as part of a recipe like hash or all by themselves. As a bonus, I have learned that canned beans travel really well and are almost as easy to have on hand as cheerios. I have started packing them when we travel as a family which guarantees that Nicole will have something hearty and nutritious to eat regardless of where we stop along the way.
Soup and Chili = an easy meal for all.
I consider soup and chili the MVP of feeding a toddler. I have made countless soups and chilis since Nicole started eating solid food and I have had spades of success feeding her them every time. I think chili in particular almost always embraces both of the first two principles of tender meat and finger food. Wether I dig out the soft sweet potatoes and hunks of tender ground turkey in our favorite quinoa chili for Nicole to feed to herself or let her try her hand at using a spoon in a bowl of thick and hearty taco chili, meal time is inevitably successful. Depending on Nicole's mood and how interested she is in the food in my bowl, I sometimes end up spoon feeding her bites of my dinner. But, she'll feed herself at least part of the meal when I'm serving something with so many easy components for her to eat. When I make soup recipes that are supposed to be smooth, like black bean soup, I generally forgo the pureeing step in favor of keeping things chunky enough for small fingers to navigate.
Soft vegetables = easy nutrition.
I admittedly didn't know how to get Nicole to eat vegetables. I roast the vast majority of the vegetables Shawn and I eat and in general the end product wasn't soft enough for Nicole's limited teeth to handle. I didn't want to give up on vegetables until she had enough teeth to get through them because I was concerned that we would have already established a precedence surrounding her food that would be hard to change. I started paying attention to how my friends were navigating the vegetable scene and I realized that there were multiple approaches I could try. We started with frozen peas after I stumbled across a mom who packed frozen peas in her kids lunches because they thawed in the fridge overnight. A no cook, no chop vegetable sounded like the perfect place to start. Then we were out to eat one night many months ago and I ordered country style green beans to go with my dinner. They were so tender that Nicole ate my entire bowl. I googled country style green beans as soon as we got in the car and set out to re-create them at home. Many batches of green beans later, I now forgo any kind of fancy ham bones and instead simmer frozen green beans in chicken broth for the afternoon. I make about 2 pounds of frozen beans at a time and then portion them out and pop whatever I don't need for the week in the freezer. Nicole's third favorite vegetable is zucchini. I peel it and then give the flesh a quick saute in olive oil. Nicole will eat an entire medium zucchini at a time when I prepare them for her that way and she will eat them warm, room temperate or straight out of the fridge. I saute enough zucchini to last about half of the week and then usually pull out frozen peas or some of my portioned green beans to round out the rest of the week.
Fruit = snacks and dessert.
Fruit is an automatic winner in our household. I know some parents who swear by bananas but in the Carlson household we swear by fruit as a whole. This is one of the easiest ways for me to shop seasonal, sale items because Nicole is so receptive to fruit of all kinds. Harder fruit like apples are still tough for her but we've had great luck with anything that can soften such as pears, all varieties of berries and a wide array of melons. I serve a small amount of fruit with breakfast and I let Nicole snack on fruit in between meals but when lunch and dinner are concerned, I only serve fruit at the end of her meal. It's a very rare day when Nicole will eat her vegetables instead of her fruit so I've learned to serve the fruit last, like a dessert, so that she eats the other components of her meal when she's the hungriest.
When all else fails, turn to salsa, hummus and peanut butter.
Nicole has always been very secretive about her teething but after a few "off" days and difficult meal times I can usually guess what's going on. When Nicole's mouth is too sore to eat family dinner, I feed her salsa, hummus and peanut butter by the spoonful. I gravitate towards hummus and peanut butter for the protein they offer as well as their ability to stick to a spoon. My responsibility during these stretches of picky eating is simply to hand Nicole spoonfuls of whatever she's eating and let her feed herself. I tend to get a little more involved with the salsa since it's runny and is easily spilled but otherwise happily respond to requests for "butter" (peanut butter), "hummus" and "salsa."
Bon Appetit!
Love,
Erica
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