Dinner for Bea

Each Wednesday I've been linking up to Mini Meals on Lauren's with two cats blog.  This week I'm showing a dinner that we recently served to Bea.

Lasagna has been a consistent favorite of Bea's since she moved from purees to solids.  I'm going to start playing around with my recipe and loading some veggies into the sauce, but this is just a traditional lasagna.  Along with it are garlic cheese toasts (made from leftover crescent rolls), roasted broccoli, and apples.

Heather

Mini Meals-Lunch for Bea

Each Wednesday I've been linking up on Lauren's blog, with two cats, for her Mini Meals posts.  I love that she's doing this, it's given me a ton of great ideas to (hopefully) get out of our chicken nugget and pb&j rut.

The latest meal I'm posting is a lunch meal for Bea.  Here we have falafel from Trader Joe's, pita chips (I toasted pita in the oven), red pepper hummus, cherry tomatoes and celery, and strawberries.  For a child who refuses to eat her veggies Bea ate a ton of falafel.  I'm suspecting she didn't know it was full of veggies.  Whatever it takes, right?

A few other things that I've found work for us are limiting snacks and allowing Bea to help me prepare meals. It occurred to me a few weeks ago that maybe I had been offering up to much during snack time and she was filling up and that's why she wouldn't eat.  So I pretty much stopped the pretzel goldfish snacking.  Now if we have a morning snack it's something like dried apricots, and just a couple.  I've already noticed a huge difference in her during meal times.  And of course if she tells me she's hungry I offer her something to eat but for the most part she hasn't.

Also, a few weeks ago I had her help me make chocolate zucchini bread and since then every time I walk near the kitchen she comes running from the other room screaming 'I help mommy'.  She has a little step stool from Ikea and we pull it over next to me and she watches as I cut things, she assists in throwing things in the trash, and she loves to stir and pour.  As a bonus I've also noticed that she's started trying things while we're cooking that she wouldn't touch before.  Like salmon cakes, mushrooms, and peppers.

Fingers crossed this isn't just a phase!

Heather

Dinner for Bea

I've really been trying to shake things up a little bit when it comes to Bea's mealtimes.  I've found myself falling into the same routine of pb&j, chicken nuggets, pancakes, fish sticks.  You know, all of those things that most kids love and will eat.  The thing is, when we first started table food with Bea she did such a good job.  Salmon, gobbled it up, broccoli, couldn't get enough of it.  I'm not really sure where we went wrong but now she pretty much refuses to eat veggies and has become so picky about everything.  I'm sure part of it is being a toddler but part of it is also my fault that I keep feeding her the same things over and over.

So, when I read that Lauren from with two cats was starting a series called Mini Meals I decided to start putting more of an effort into Bea's meals.  Here's what was for dinner tonight.

Whole wheat "pizzas" using English muffins, pasta sauce, pepperoni (a favorite of Bea's), and cheese along with roasted butternut squash, and grapes/dried cranberries.

Heather