Nutrition For Picky Eaters

There are three types of people in my household. The kind who will pretty much eat anything you put in front of them (Elliot), the kind who will force themselves to eat something even if they don’t like it because it’s good for them (me), and the kind who refuse to touch anything they’ve tried once and didn’t like (Stella and Jakob). Needless to say, it’s not easy getting Stella and Jakob to eat a well rounded diet. If it were up to them they’d exist on meat and fruit. Throw in a peanut butter sandwich for Stella sometimes.

         I think the reason that Stella and Elliot are so different is because frankly, I failed when it came to introducing solids to Stella. I wasn’t Ed to d baby led weaning, but didn’t really know how. I didn’t understand that I could just feed her whatever we were having, just prepared slightly differently. A lot of times we were eating restaurant or processed food which I didn’t want her eating anyway. I would feed her some vegetables, fruit, yogurt, baby food pouches, and puffs but for the most part she was still just getting breast milk. I realize now she really needed more and there’s a good chance she had some nutritional gaps (although I hope not) during that time but hind site is 20/20. I went by the “food before one is for fun” philosophy. By the time Elliot was eating solids we were eating a healthy diet, always trying new things, and so from the beginning he was just getting whatever we had and a wide variety of things. There was one time we had steak and I was concerned with how tough it was so I pre-chewed  it for him which is a little weird but ya gotta do whatcha gotta do sometimes.

        When Stella turned a year I started doing a weekly meal rotation. The six meals were tacos, baked chicken, fish, turkey burgers, black bean burgers, one night of leftovers, and one night of us eating out and more leftovers for Stella. She was at least getting a healthy diet, but she wasn’t ever getting anything new so I basically conditioned her to only eat the same five foods. Right before Elliot was born I got a new meal planner with six weeks worth of meals in it. (I highly recommend it! Here’s the link!) We did that for probably about a year. At first Stella wouldn’t try any of the new dishes, but she did start to diversify after she realized she didn’t have much of a choice.

        Stella is still pretty picky, won’t eat many vegetables willingly and avocado and peppers are always a no go no matter how I prepare them, but now that she’s older I can reason with her better. For example, I tell her she has to eat a piece of broccoli then she can have another slice of apple. Or you have to eat three bites of your stir fry before you can have half a banana. Three more bites to get the other half. I do allow her to always have fruit with her meal but she has to eat some of the meal to get more fruit. I explain to her the bugs in her tummy need fruit AND cauliflower, asparagus, or whatever else she doesn’t want. This has taught her to eat everything on her plate via a rotation process. On the rare occasion we go to buffalo wild rings and she gets fries and a burger, she’ll take couple bites of burger then eat some fries then more burger then more fries. This drives Elliot crazy though, because he finishes all his fries first then wants to eat her fries before he eats his burger… She does the same thing with her eggs and toast, switching back and forth until they’re both gone or she’s full. I can’t reason with Jakob like that, sadly, so I’m stuck sneaking foods into our meals he wouldn’t normally eat.

        I buy a box of baby mixed greens every week and every time I cook eggs (which is almost every morning) I cut up greens to go in the eggs. I also buy a bag of mini sweet peppers and cut those up to put in the eggs. Stella still eats around the peppers but I figure she at least gets some, and hopefully some of the nutrient leaches into the eggs when the peppers are cooked. Sometimes when I make her toast I’ll spread avocado on it, Jakob doesn’t fall for that though.

         Beef liver is one of, if not the, most bioavailability and nutritionally dense foods there is, but none of us can stomach is straight. When I first started getting I was mixing in half a pound of beef liver for every one pound ground beef, but that was too strong for Jakob and I.  Ironically Stella, who was somewhere between a year and 18 months at the time gobbled it up. I gave up and we started doing beef liver pills daily. When Elliot first started solids around seven months (I waited until he could sit up on his own at his table and chairs to start solids with him,) I would open a capsule and sprinkle it on his eggs for breakfast. He loved it but any leftovers got thrown out because no one else could stomach it.

       I heard on a podcast the trick to hiding the taste of beef liver in your foods was not to go over 20% beef liver in a dish. I started thawing a pound at a time, blending it up, then dispersing it into a silicone baby food puree dish I had.

When I cook my ground beef I just pop out a frozen section and put it into the pan with the ground beef, cooking it all together. Once in a while, Jakob or I will get  a bite where we can taste a subtle hint but for the most part you can’t tell.

        I tried so hard to find a mushroom dish Jakob would eat but in the end no matter how I prepared it he complained. A couple months ago, in a Mediterranean diet cookbook, it recommended blending the mushrooms and adding it to your ground beef. Now, once a week I buy a pint of mushrooms, blend them in the blender, and add them to my ground beef/beef liver mixture. It worked best when there’s a sauce (like enchilada sauce for a taco dish or spaghetti sauce) to add to the blender when I blend the mushrooms but if there’s no sauce with that meal I just add water.

        I generally buy one of each organic vegetable they have at the grocery store weekly and make a stir fry with it. (Our favorite stir fry is ground beef, mixture of whatever veggies I have, garlic powder, ginger, and coconut aminos.) When we have steak or chicken sometimes I steam frozen vegetables for a side or a favorite is mashed cauliflower. I steam the cauliflower, then put it in a blender with some of the water, garlic powder, salt, peppers, and a whole lot of grass fed butter. It’s honestly just as good if not better than mashed potatoes but a lot more nutritious. I get cauliflower and almond flour pizza crust and whenever I make pizza I always cut up whatever veggies I have on hand to add on top. A couple weeks ago I made a chicken and Alfredo sauce pizza and topped it with asparagus and it was definitely a favorite for everyone.

        When it comes to snacks for the kids, I actually got this idea from a new friend in my homeschooling community. I got 6 small stainless steal containers, and try to do 2 proteins, 2 veggies, 2 fruits for every outting. If they don’t all get eaten they go in the fridge for the next day. The kids favorite is carrots. I buy a bag of carrots and just cut them up in the size of baby carrots. (Evidently baby carrots are washed in chlorine and even though they say they’re well rinsed I’m just not comfortable with that. Plus, a lot of nutrition is in the outer layer which is cut away from baby carrots.) I’ll also buy heads of broccoli and slice those up or whatever other random vegetables I have in the fridge like squash, cucumber, zucchini, or peppers. The vegetables are obviously never the go to snack for the kids, or at least not for Stella, but once they eat the rest they’ll eat that or I’ll do my “apple slice, piece of vegetable” negotiation.

        I keep sprouted nuts in the car for if I ever forget snacks and the kids are hungry, or have finished what I brought. I keep grass fed beef sticks and string cheese on hand for when I need to grab something quick as I’m dashing out of the house. We also recently started getting seaweed baked in avocado oil in pre packaged containers to take as well. Elliot and I love it, Stella hasn’t quite come around yet…

        For meals on the go, this is going to sound a little crazy but I often grab a can of black beans and a can of pumpkin. I feed it to them right out of the can and they love it. We also do a lot of peanut butter sandwiches. I get a brand of fish packets called “Safe Catch” that we’ll take sometimes too. We have sardines at home but I don’t take those out because I think that might be a little too far for public consumption…

         Other things I try to always have on hand for the kids is yogurt and kefir (which I alternate), pasta (chickpea pasta, lentil pasta, or jovial whole grain pasta) and sauce although Stella likes to eat it plain sometimes. One time I didn’t have any sauce and tried using pumpkin as a sauce and Elliot was into that but Stella preferred plain pasta with her pumpkin on the side. I get a brand of crackers baked with olive oil instead of seed oils from Kroger called Firehook to have with raw cheese. Once in a while I’ll buy some uncured pepperoni or turkey. Last week I made mini turkey cheese sandwiches with the crackers and the kids loved that. Snacking/grape tomatoes are always a favorite for the kids too.

        Jakob and I definitely eat out more than I’d like us to. We at least go out to eat once, sometimes twice, a week for dates and I’d like to cut that down to once every other week at most. I made jars with date ideas other than eating out in it but we haven’t actually used them yet… we very rarely take the kids out to eat, but sometimes it’s a necessity because of a busy day and no time to cook. If we need something fast we opt for chipotle or subway generally. Or if we’re traveling and we pass a chick a fila, which Jakob and I can’t pass up because we don’t have one in town, we’ll get the kids grilled nuggets and fruit. For the longest time we could eat in the front seat and the kids never asked. This past summer, a couple weeks before Stella turned 3, we had gone through drivethrough and as soon as the guy handed us our food we heard a voice in the back go, “I want some of your food!” We tried to play it off by saying “what food?” And she replied, “the food the guy handed daddy!” So that was the end of that.

        If we do go out to eat, we try to do beef over chicken or pork because it’s least likely to be mistreated and fed creepy things it shouldn’t have been. Even if it was fed grain at a grain mill at the end of its life, theoretically (hopefully) for most of its life it was out on pasture. We usually do a burger with no bun for the kids and a side of vegetables. Honestly, the last couple times we gave into French fries because we wanted French fries but I’d like to get back to the vegetable side. Jakob likes to get the kids juice as a little treat when we do take them out for a “family date” (as we call it) but I always have the waitress fill it with half water, half juice.

        Last few tips, whenever I cook I always cook extra. We have it for leftovers for at least a day sometimes more depending on how much I make. If I have a ton of leftovers, I’ll freeze part of it in a mason jar for those days when I won’t have time to cook. I just set the mason jar(s) put in the morning, they throughout the day, and in the evening I can warm them up in a pot or the oven. (We don’t have  a microwave but that’s a whole ‘nother story.) I usually cook 3 pounds of ground beef when I make a stir fry, and I make three pounds of chicken in the crockpot every week. I use the chicken in different recipes throughout the week, or make chicken salad for lunches, or we have plain chicken with different sauces for lunches. I like to cook a whole chicken every so often and then use the carcass to make homemade chicken stock as well to keep on hand in the freezer. With this method it gives me a lot more free time since I’m only cooking meat a few times a week, and one of those is in the crockpot. Whenever I make protein shakes I always add greens and some yogurt or kefir for probiotics.

         There are definitely things I want to incorporate more into our diet, one of them being bone broth. The last two years I’ve wanted to try bone broth hot chocolate but haven’t done it, maybe this year is it. We’re really bad about eating fermented food. I have a powder probiotic I got from Just Ingredients the kids and I drink in the morning, (link) and the kids consume a lot of yogurt and kefir, but Jakob and I definitely lack in probiotics. I have sauerkraut and kimchi in the fridge but it just sits there because we don’t even see it anymore and never think to eat it. I eat a couple spoonfuls when I notice it, but I’d like to be better about having a serving of fermented foods with every meal.

        Send me your recipes and tips you have so I can and them to my repertoire! Let me know if you have any questions for recommendations on anything I mentioned above. If you want more insights into how I keep things running smoothly and nourished (or as smoothly and nourished as possible) with two toddlers scroll to the bottom of my home page and subscribe!