Recently I shared with a friend how I prepared meal for my children when my kids were 11-18 months. I am not good at cooking, but please allow me to share this here from a perspective of a busy working parent.For working parents like me, finding time to cook is a challenge. At the same time, as parents, we want the nutritious food for our kids. Here's a good compromise :
Healthy Porridge for Toddlers.
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Equipment Needed :
1) Slow Cooker
2) Chopping equipment
Recipe:
1) Group 1 : Rice, may add barley or oat
2) Group 2 : Pumpkin, Carrot, Sweet Potato
3) Group 3: Cabbage or Chinese Cabbage
4) Group 4 : Chicken or Pork
5) Group 5: Fish Meat (Grouper, Seabass, Salmon or Cod or other sea fish)
6) Group 6 : Green Vegetables (any green leafy vegetables, one good candidate is Spinach)
Use one ingredient from each group and change your ingredients accordingly. Buying small portion is quite difficult, and changing the ingredients too often may means putting the food longer in fridge.
Preparation:
The challenge is to buy such small daily portion. I buy a portion needed for the week. I prepared the material during weekends and keep one day's need into one container so that I defrost only the portion I need daily.
Direction :
1. Chop all ingredients from group 2 - 4 into the size of the grains (or at maximum 2-3 times)**.
2. Slice the Fish Meat.
3. Mixed everything from Group 1-4 into the slow cooker and add water. Guideline: depends on the rice, volume of water is at least 5 times the rice.
4. Cook in "slow fire" for 3-4 hours.
5. Add Fish Meat from Group 5 at least 30 minutes before serve.
6. Add Green Vegetables into the pot 2 minutes before serve***
** : If you don't want your kids to eat much meat, one solution may be throw away the meat since the meat has little taste and may be too hard after cooking for so long. I do this
*** I seldom do this. Usually we have green vegetables for adults and we just share a small portion with the toddlers.
I cannot remember the exact amount from each ingredient but I think that's not important. This needs a bit of adjustment to the kids needs. Usually, I defrost the material in the morning and start cooking using slow cooker. The kids will eat this for lunch and I will power off the slow cooker and heat up again at night.
I was told by my pediatrician that toddlers after 12 months can basically eat any of adult food. Therefore, I add some of my family food to the porridge so that my kids can experiment different taste and learn towards eating same food as me. I cannot remember when I stopped doing this. However, as parents, you will know because your darling will sooner reject this porridge and only wants your food!
Happy parenting!
