Today we’re going to talk a little bit about food for toddlers up to about age six or seven. We’ll look at some ideas and principles that you can use when you’re thinking about what to make for your little ones for lunch, dinner, and even breakfast, and what’ll help you in that pursuit. Americans, I hope you had a lovely 4th of July weekend!
So, let’s get started. I love the years with little ones. Sadly, I don’t have a child under 10 anymore – our five are all 11 and over, but those were such special years. I must say though, the teenage years are wonderful and special in a different way – very much so. But those little years are such fun.
I remember often we would have lunch outside during homeschool. The kids would have a little divided plate with a yogurt, a piece of cheese, and some kind of bread, or a bread roll and a little bit of meat. It was a really easy meal for me because they go outside. They enjoy being out there, it’s a special thing like a picnic, and it’s very easy. You can put a little dried fruit and a few nuts on the plate as well, and then we’re done. Even doing inside meals like that was helpful, where it was a few odd small items put together. That made a great meal for a toddler or a young kid.
I just thought we’d chat a little bit about that today – a trip down memory lane for me. Point number one, a practical strategy, is to keep it simple. If you’re making food for your toddler or for your young children, it’s always good to keep it simple, from their perspective and from yours. They’re going to like the items on the plate to all be separate, and very easily recognizable; something that they’re familiar with.
Don’t use too many different items. We don’t want to overwhelm them or make them feel like it’s too much to eat. We want to avoid sensory overload, so maybe have about three different things. Try to have a couple of bright colors – maybe fruit – a starch, and some meat or a bit of dairy like some cheese or some yogurt. Use anything that they’re going to be familiar with, and immediately think “Yes, I want to eat that.”
Number two – serve small portions. Small amounts of each thing is less intimidating. Then you can also give them seconds if they like it, if they ask for more; if they’re still hungry. This also helps them to learn to eat intuitively. They eat what there is, and then they can say, “Please, can I have more of this,
and not this?” It helps them to be in control of what they’re eating.
Number three – a routine is very helpful. When you have a routine, they can expect their meals and their snacks at a consistent time each day, so it’s predictable. It helps them feel secure. Their bodies are ready to eat. Their minds are anticipating it. They’ll digest it more easily. They’re excited about it, and they’ll come and see what you’re doing. Are you putting food on their plates? Are you chopping stuff? Can they help? Can they get involved? Then they’re ready for the meal.
Point number four, which is along those lines, is about making it fun. If they’re there while you’re making the meal, you can use cookie cutters to cut fun shapes in your sandwiches or your fruits or vegetables. You can make little faces or figures of people with your ingredients on a plate – anything that makes it fun and engaging for your kids.
Number five is involving them. They’re probably already going to be hanging around, interested in what you’re doing, so it’s very easy to let them help, whether it’s stirring something, sprinkling things, or assembling parts of their meal. They’re more likely to eat it and to be excited about it if they help to make it. So, see what ways you can involve them, and have a little step in the kitchen. We always had those plastic, three step ladders in the kitchen, and the kids could climb up those and stand at counter level. Then they would often do the mixing or putting of whatever onto plates. They love that.
Number six – eat the rainbow. I always try to think of the colors of the rainbow to ensure that I’m giving my kids a balanced diet over the week, especially for young children. Again, fruits are fabulous – strawberries, blueberries. Carrots are orange, peas are green, and grapes are purple or green. Bright foods are nutritious, and they attract attention. Having a range of colors promotes that balanced nutrition.
Have some things like cucumber or celery sticks, which are green, and tomatoes, which are red, and then you can add your dairy and meat to that. It helps you to make sure they’ve got lots of good, raw, or even cooked healthy vegetables and fruits. You can also add color with a dip. If you have steamed little heads of broccoli, they can dip that into some feta that’s been whipped up, or some hummus.
Then number seven – offer choices within limits. Don’t give them endless choices, but let them choose between two healthy options. “Today, would you like apple slices or a banana with your sandwich?” Somehow, giving them that sense of control that they have some input helps it not to feel overwhelming, and they know what to anticipate when they’re about to eat.
Point number eight is repetition. Kids often need to see a food many times, maybe about 10 times, before it becomes normal to them, and they can completely accept it. Keep offering a food that you know they’re a little unsure about, but without pressure that they have to eat it. The exposure is what matters. Seeing it on the plate, seeing you eat it, and having it be a common food at dinnertime will definitely help them to accept it over time.
That brings me to number nine – avoid food pressure. Don’t force new foods, don’t force bites, don’t bargain, and don’t even reward them with something like a chocolate if they eat the food. Just treat it as a normal part of life. “You don’t have to eat it, but it’s here if you want to try it.” Then you have a bite and enjoy it, and hopefully over time they’ll try things and learn to enjoy them.
Number ten – when you can, prepare ahead of time. Do anything that helps you to be able to just take out a bag full of something from the freezer and defrost it, or take something out of the cupboard. Maybe this would be a bag full of mini muffins from the freezer, some prepackaged snacks, or a nut and raisin trail mix from your cupboard. Things that you’ve prepackaged that are easy to add to your meals are really helpful, especially on busy days.
You can freeze pre-made, tiny meatballs. You could pre-cut vegetables and put them in your fridge. It also helps to pre-portion your snacks. If you make some brownies, or any kind of nutrition balls, you can have those pre-portioned, and just add them to your plates.I like to keep some biltong or jerky in the freezer to add to meals. I just keep it there and then it defrosts very quickly once you take it out.
Speaking of things that you’re introducing your children to, point eleven is to always combine new with familiar. If you want to introduce a new food to them, you want them to be exposed to it, so keep bringing it out on the plate, but put it next to something they’re very familiar with. Pair something with cheese and apple slices, or something they already love – the third item is the new thing. Then they can be adventurous when they feel ready to.
Number twelve is the presentation. This is just like with adults – we love plates that are arranged beautifully at a restaurant. It’s appetizing and appealing to see a plate beautifully laid out. Your presentation for kids matters too. Maybe use kid-sized plates, fun utensils with colors, little food forks that you can stick in the food, or section plates to organize the food. Anything that makes it look inviting is going to help them to eat what you give them. It really doesn’t have to be complicated.
Maybe your toddlers or your young kids are great eaters, and in that case, you can just enjoy this season. I think the easiest thing to do is always to start with one or two fruits and some salad ingredients, so maybe strawberries, blueberries, and some pieces of cucumber. Then you can add a little dairy, like a piece of cheese, and a little bit of meat, like some shredded chicken with mayonnaise. That’s very quick and easy. They don’t need fancy, combined casseroles. All they need are the elements of a good, nutritious meal, and they prefer to have them in separate sections of the plate.
So, now I’m going to mention some ideas for the different meals of the day and for snacks; specific things you could do. Here are some practical breakfast ideas for toddlers or young kids. You can do mini pancakes, maybe banana pancakes; anything that’s quick and easy, with a little smear of peanut butter or almond butter, or some Greek yogurt on top with berries. Pancakes are always a win. You can make scrambled eggs with vegetables. You could add finely chopped zucchini, mushrooms, or bell pepper to the scrambled eggs to make it a good rounded meal. Add some milk to your eggs before you cook them – very nutritious.
Then there’s oatmeal. You can do it with fruit like mashed banana or strawberries, or just add cinnamon and a splash of milk, and even a little cocoa powder if you feel like it. You can do Greek yogurt. You can layer your yogurt – maybe even with crushed graham crackers as a treat, but layer it with fresh fruit, and put a little bit of maple syrup on the top.
You can try toast soldiers. We had this when I was young. Have a soft boiled egg, put it in an egg cup and show them how to crack the shell on top. They love doing that. Cut off the white, and then you have your egg for dipping. The toast soldiers are what you dip into the egg, and toddlers love that.
Here are some snack ideas. Anything you can do in advance and keep in your freezer is a lifesaver here. Do something like homemade mini muffins or brownies, chopped into squares, with a little bit of extra protein in them. Those are great. There are things like fruit again, or cheese. You can make little fruit kebabs with grapes and pieces of strawberry or melon on them. Make them extra interesting for the kids, but use sticks that are not too spiky.
Then there are vegetable muffins. You can use zucchini and cheese, or carrots in them. You can even make breakfast muffins. You can have mini rice cakes with something like almond butter or peanut butter. Add banana slices on top. You also get corn cakes – they taste different to rice cakes. Some people prefer one and some the other.
You can make smoothies with a little bit of yogurt, fruit, and maybe you can put a little bit of oats or almond butter in there. Another good snack is boiled eggs, and then there’s crackers and cheese. You can buy soft cheese, like laughing cow cheese, or cheddar – something aged for that vitamin K. You can use any kind of crackers. Wheat crackers or rice crackers are lovely to put cheese on, and eat as a little mini sandwich.
Then let’s look at some ideas for lunches. You can make a little rollup. You can get sliced Turkey deli meat, sliced chicken, pastrami beef, ham, or any of those. You roll them with a cheese slice, and then you’ve got your little rollup containing a slice of meat and a slice of cheese. It’s toddler friendly, and you can add some cucumber sticks, carrot sticks, or apple slices to that.
You could try mini quesadillas. Take your tortillas and put cheese and ham slices inside, or finely chopped vegetables, and cut them into triangles. You can toast them in a pan or in the oven. You can also make tortillas into little folded pizza-like things. Just put some mozzarella and a little bit of ham or pepperoni in there.
Mac and cheese is always a big hit, and you can add some hidden vegetables in there, like blended sweet potato, cooked carrot, or cauliflower in the cheese sauce. You can use pita breads in a similar way to the pizza on the tortillas. Cut open the pita pocket, and add a few pizza ingredients, maybe some tomato sauce, mozzarella, and anything you like on top of your pizza. Then bake those in the oven, and cut them up. They’re like pizza sandwiches or filled pizza pockets.
You can do any kind of snack plate with things like cubes of cheese, crackers, cherry tomatoes, chopped up fruit, or yogurt. As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, you can have this as an outside lunch. Those are always great.
You can use cream cheese as a dip, and have cucumber and carrot sticks to dip into it. You can also mash up your avo and add a little salt, or make it full-on guacamole, and then dip your cucumber, carrot, celery, or any other vegetables into it. You can make sandwiches from the same kind of ingredients – cream cheese with pepperoni or salami slices inside, or any kind of shredded meat. If you have some leftover pulled pork, some leftover shredded beef or chicken, then you can just add it in there with a little bit of barbecue sauce and some cheese.
If you have a few little ones, you could make a frittata for lunch using some chopped vegetables; zucchini, mushrooms, et cetera, and then your egg, similar to the scrambled egg with veggies for breakfast. Add your vegetables first. Make sure they’re well cooked, and then pour in some egg with milk in it that you’ve whisked up, and let it cook to be a frittata. Then you can give them each a slice of that. Even cut out a shape with a cookie cutter from your frittata to put on their plate.
Grilled cheese sandwiches with a tomato soup or tomato dip is always a hit. Buttery sandwiches are delicious, but that one would need a bit of help to not be too messy. You can do little salad piles – tuna salad or chicken salad, just on their own with a little spoon. Toddlers enjoy that. You can add some nuts or some chopped apple on the side. Then there are baked potatoes. You can use potatoes that you’ve cooked. Open them up, get potato out and mash it, and then add a bit of cream and butter and season. You can also add something like corn, or just cheese, and add it back into the potato jacket. This is like twice baked potatoes in a simpler form.
Then lastly, here are a few ideas for dinners. There are mini meatballs. For some reason, toddlers like mini things, and they’re not so crazy about the sauce. Perhaps you could put the sauce as a dipping option, but just put the plain meatballs on the plate, and possibly stick some little toothpicks into them so that they’re easy to pick up and eat.
You can also do any kind of mini kebabs. If they’ve got tiny pieces of cooked meat on them, like barbecue chicken, that’s great. A fruit salad kebab would have things like strawberries, blueberries, and maybe even a fun little marshmallow now and then. You could do dessert kebabs too, and there are salad kebabs – a little cucumber piece, a piece of feta, an olive without the pip and a baby tomato, and then repeat. Those are fun little things to put with dinner, or to eat as dinner.
You can have stir-fried rice, with egg, and maybe vegetables or fish bites. If you bake your fish and then flake it into small pieces, that’s always welcome. I think the most important thing is to keep it simple and not have too many different things at once.
You can make little potato squares – chop up your cooked potatoes and fry them or roast them. Make smaller than you would for normal roast potatoes. Little blocks of food are enticing – ones that they can have in one mouthful, and they don’t have to bite. You can do little pieces of meat that have been chopped up, and small vegetables. Those help your child want to eat.
I’m sure you’ve got lots more bright ideas, and I hope this has inspired you. You should sit down, brainstorm, and write down a whole lot of ideas before they go out of your head. Happy cooking for your young children. Enjoy this season while you’re in it!
