Just veg for dinner or should I be giving meat / fish etc?

[L76]

Hi there

My DD is just over 8 months and has been eating solids for nearly 3 months. She is well established on 3 meals a day and has 3 bottles + 1 BF each day. Sometimes I also give a snack in the afternoon of a rice cake.

For breakfast she has porridge or weetabix + fruit.
For lunch she has chicken or beef + veg or pasta + veg or lentils + veg then yoghurt or fruit
For dinner she has veg + fruit + yoghurt

She will also have bread fingers or veg fingers whilst I am preparing food etc.

I have stuck with veg at dinner time as I thought it would be easier to digest at nighttime but am wondering what else to give her or if I should be giving meat / pasta / lentils / fish etc twice a day?

Also, any ideas for puddings - have just been doing different fruit + yoghurt but wanted some other ideas.

She loves her food and very open to new things so ideas welcome pls.
Thought about scrambled egg (well cooked), or perhaps just going onto finger food dinners like crackers, bread, cheese etc. She is fine with lumps and finger food BTW.

Thanks

Leanne x

[Diana1981]

If she is open to new foods I`ll say give her all you can......my ds was the same at that age and now he is so picky!
Try to have different ideas everyday so she wont get bored with the same

[jess, lukeys_mom]

It is fine if you are not doing a protein for dinner right now, though as she gets a little older then I would add one. I used to do yogurt-based lunches a lot with ds and would often mash a little tofu in there and add some flax seed for some protein.  Has your lo had difficulty with digesting at night?
For now I would probably do a starch with dinner in addition to the veg at dinner. Maybe a little toast? If you spread something on the toast like cream cheese then you already have your protein right there.

Your lo is still so young so solids are not as crucial, as she starts to get a little older I would try to do a starch + protein + fruit and/or veg at each lunch and dinner.

[L76]

Hi there

She does tend to have some cheese and bread at dinner time already but just wondered about the meat / fish really or pasta / lentils I suppose.
She tends to nibbble (or should I say gobble) at bread fingers when I am cooking - keeps her amused for ages trying to pick each piece up and aim right in the mouth!
Great for her hand / eye co-ordination!
Mean old me, but I make the pieces small sometimes just to encourage her! hee hee

Anyway, never had much trouble at nightime digestion wise but didn't want to add it too soon - thought that by 9 months I'd probably need it but I do make sure she always has it for lunch every day.

Loving the cooking part of this - I made some little cottage pie's today - fingers crossed they go down well tomorrow!

Thanks for the advice
x

[jess, lukeys_mom]

Great that you are having so much fun with her food!

I just wanted to mention about the food groups you named...  lentils and cheese, depending on what they're served with, can be considered proteins in the same way as meat and fish. Especially when you serve these with whole grains, such as bread or rice.  Pasta is a starch the way a bread is. So if she is getting cheese and bread at dinner, these more or less satisfy the protein/starch groups, so no issue either way. Hope that makes sense? X

[lilmonkey]

We did BLW with ds and I basically serve him what whatever was on my plate.  Some nights all he ate was one food group.  I do agree with Jess that solids is mostly for experimentation and taste at this age.  Some moms found that their los prefer meat in it's natural state (small bits, not puree) so you might want to consider that when you introduce meat.

HTH

[deb]

...  lentils and cheese, depending on what they're served with, can be considered proteins in the same way as meat and fish.

I was also going to mention that animal proteins are pretty much animal proteins.

BTW, when doing chicken, as strange as it might sound to us grownups, go for dark meat! It has more fat! This means more calories, and animal fats go right to making people fat AND people brain and neuron tissue! For babies and toddlers, this is GOOD!!!!

It's the "bad" fats, like trans fats in margarine and don't even think about cheese curls, as well as those produced when "good" fats like olive oil and flaxseed oil are subjected to high heat (i.e. don't fry with them EVER!!!) that aren't good.

[L76]

ok, cheese curls... an american thing???

she is getting plenty of dairy protein, starch etc but just not given too much variety at tea time - just bread, cheese, yoghurt, veg and fruit.
am about to switch final BF to bottle in a few days - the bed time one is the last to go (back to work beckons unfortunately but given i was going to only do 3 months, am proud to say i lasted over 8 months!!!) so once we've made the transition to bottle at bedtime, perhaps I'll experiment with her food.

That said, the nursery she goes to does tea time at 4pm which is way way earlier than i do it currently (we do tea at about 5.30 after her catnap) so am thinking that as she has a bottle currently at 3pm, she will either drop the bottle and eat their tea, or keep the bottle, not be that interested in their tea and want some kind of snack instead when she gets home from nursery before the bedtime bottle - does this sound about right?

x

[CCCmom27]

That made me laugh Leanne... I'm sure cheese curls are an American thing!  We seem to like a lot of unhealthy, unnatural things.

Deb you aren't supposed to fry olive oil?  Does that mean it's bad to heat it in a skillet and say saute chicken or vegtables?  I'm just not sure how high high heat is?

[jess, lukeys_mom]

Leanne,  my day care does not do tea time at all, but they do loads of snacks around 4 (yogurt, bread, etc). I have found that my lo does not each much dinner on nursery days unfortunately, so I try to give him veggies with his breakfast, which luckily he has always been pretty willing to eat.  If your lo eats dinner at nursery at 4 then I think that is great, and then you can give her a healthy snack before bathtime so she's not hungry going to bed.
Good luck going back to work. X

[L76]

Thanks Jess. I think they give more 'meal-like' dinners but to be honest, as I'm not back at work yet, I've been collecting her around 3ish so she's not stayed all day yet. Looking at their menus there are some days which look more like snacks but most are things like pasta bake.

Hopefully I'll be able to get away with something like fruit pieces and yoghurt as a snack around 5.30 ish to keep her going til bedtime.

CCmom27 - definitely an American thing!!!! However, I am sure we have some strange things over the pond too!!!! But I do fry with olive oil too - so we can't be that different eh!!!

xxx

[deb]

Olive oil is OK for light sauteeing, fine to put in pasta water, but when you get to out-and-out high-heat frying, the fats degrade from "good" ones to "bad" ones.

For high-heat frying, like for eggs fried potatoes or deep-frying, coconut oil is much more stable. And if you get a high-quality coconut oil, it doesn't have a strong coconut taste, although I find I quite like it for frying up veggies and eggs and even sausages. You can fry with butter, too. The fats that are NATURALLY highly saturated (as opposed to trans fats like margarine) tend to be more stable for frying.

I think there may be more info on this in the Nourishing Traditions thread.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled thread.