Milk and egg free finger foods?

[fallingandlaughing]

DD is nearly a year and has Cow's Milk Protein Allergy and Egg Allergy. She can't have any animal milks (except human!).

She has decided she doesn't want to be fed from a spoon so I am struggling to come up with a good range of finger foods. There seems to be milk or egg in everything! Any ideas?

She can't live on raisin bread and soya cheese... can she?

Strips of meat
Broccoli with the stalks on as a hand hold
Strips of fruit you can buy them ready done you cut up
Could you make your own oaty bar flapjack-y type things?
If you buy a crinkle cutter thing off amazon you can cut flat pieces of things like sweet potato then roast them til they go crispy and the crinkles make it easy to hold.

Hmmm... Will have a think!

Toast with anything on top of it!
Houmus is handy too for veg sticks or toast.
Organix do some good milk and egg free finger foods like the spicy tomato stars, tomato wheels, corn puff rings, carrot sticks.
There's always rice cakes!

When dd wanted more lumpy food I started adding pasta to all her meals which meant she could pick up the pasta shapes and eat them, and some of the rest of the food would go in with it. You can get baby ones that are very small and cute for starting off with, the shells are good to help more food go in with them!

Sandwiches made with dairyfree spread (Vitalite, Pure etc) and filling of your choice eg ham (check labels as some contain milk powder), tuna with freefrom mayo, chicken, houmous etc. Rice cakes. Crackers. Sausages cut up into chunks (check labels, some contain milk). Chicken nuggets/fish fingers - Sainsbury's do freefrom versions but I think some 'normal' ones are ok too, check labels.

Youngs free from fish fingers!

Meats, mash, peas, sweetcorn, carrots, any veg, any fruit, any meat, any fish.

Spag bol, fish pie (white sauce made with soya milk), cottage pie etc etc.

Basically, anything just change the butter for vitalite and milk for soya milk.

Thanks feeling a bit more inspired now!

I'll be watching this thread too! My DS is the same with soy added to the mix too.

At the moment we do a lot of pasta and bolognaise/veg/nutramigen or squash/nutramigen sauces. Also patties of mashed sweet potato, lentils, celery, nutramigen and breadcrumbs baked in the oven and then frozen in bulk. Fish cakes should work but i can never seem to cook them properly. Various stuffs on toast pates/sardines/capaonata on toast, DS's favourite is mushroom and borlotti bean pate (onion, garlic, and mushrooms fried then boiled with beans and dried mushrooms before being blitzed and frozen in cubes). Have you tried falafal, hummous or chunky stews (floured and fried off beef, onion, ale, carrots and new potatoes in a slow cooker). We also do chunks of boiled potato and fishfingers, dairy free sausages or mini burgers (batch cooked then frozen pork and apricot or beef with tomato puree mixed in as a splodge of tomato puree means anything will go in ds!). We did do chicken burgers but these seem to have bought up his egg allergy recently so I think the chicken I bought must have been contaminate. Nutramigen and slow roast tomato polenta sticks have also been a success (boil up the polenta, leave to set and then shallow fry in chip shapes as required). If we are out then I give him a diary free ham/beef and tomato puree sandwich or apple and pear spread (look in a health food shop) if I really don't have anything else in the house.

Puddings tend to be a very stiff dollops of coconut rice pudding (pudding rice, teaspoon of sugar, can of coconut cream, vanilla essence and more nutramigen cooked until almost dry so lots of stirring so it doesn't burn, then frozen in ice cubes of course!), bought fruit and/or oat bars and fruit. I think the banana soreen would be ok too. Ds also has a chunk of fig and date bar from holland and barrett, I tend to smuggle his omeprazole in with these as he loves them.

If your baby can do pincer grip then baked beans on toast can become a very slow meal! Baked beans are the one thing my ds tolerates by spoon.

In terms of breakfasts we do raisin/apricot/blueberry/cranberry wheats or blueberry/banana/apple and cinnamon egg free pancakes made with the lovely nutramigen. I am sure you have guessed now that I batch cook the pancakes too!

I generally have some tescos bread sticks in my bag as emergency snacks as they are dairy and soy free.

Please let us know what recipes you end up doing, it feels impossible to think of meal ideas sometimes. Even more so ones that we can share so I would love some more ideas.

Happy cooking!

PS I think lots of people also do something called porridge pancakes for breakfast but ds has never gone for these. Worth a google for a recipe and give it a go if you get stuck.

Hi,
My DS has MULTIPLE food protein allergies and diary and eggs are just two of the stuff that he meant to avoid till further notice. He is 6.5 months old.
Having started weaning at 18 weeks due to his reflux, I too have been struggling to come up with exciting ideas to feed him. So far, I am ashamed to admit that I am sticking to the safe but boring vegetable purees etc. though now meat can be added. His eczema seems to have flared up last weekend when I tried cod, so I am not sure about fish in general yet.
Sorry meant to ask some of you here who suggested toast. I was in waitrose today trying to find some bread for him, but nothing I have come across does not have dried egg white powder in it. Does it not affect babies with egg allergy? Will be interested to know, thanks!
And this is a question for NeedMenInWhiteCoats - my DS is on Neocate which is vile and so no wonder he hates it! He refuses his milk feeds which is why I have to resort to using it in his food but if I don't mask the taste well enough he would refuse the solids too! Sounds like you don't have that problem with your little one with Nutramigen? Sorry I am asking cos I was told it being a HA formula tastes as bad as Neocate. As you can guess I am trying to hopefully find him a more palatable formula. We reintroduced soy by offering one milk feed a day but he refuses that too... We are at our wit's end!

Hi Confused,

You sound as if your DS has it all! I got a breadmaker because I couldn't find bread that was ok and I didn't like giving DS lots of crumpets etc because of the salt content. We have had lots of use out of it (although DH does eat a lot of bread).

If your DS will tolerate coconut then it is a really good one to get in him for the fats etc. Kara coconut milk replacement (near the longlife milk in the supermarket) is the nearest I have found to real milk for when I cook for us as a family (can't say I want to eat nutramigen!), I think it is the nearest to semi skimmed. Before DS rejected spoon feeding I used to make him a coconut lentil curry that he loved, though not enough to eat it off a spoon obv! Avocado is also a super food that would be good if your Ds will eat it.

My ds took to nutramigen really well so I don't really have any advice. We did a phased introduction over 5 days or so. He had one scoop of the new milk to 4 of the old on day one then 2 scoops of new and 3 scoops of old on the second etc that I think really helped. When we tried Nutramigen 1 going cold turkey first time he refused to drink it, I think he found the change really stressful so the reflux played up hugely, so when we tried the second time we did it as I suggested above. The AA didn't seem that different to the Nutramigen 1.

The only reassurance I can give is to say that the majority of babies won't intentionally starve themselves. I presume you are under consultant care, have you asked to see a dietician? There were a couple of times when we were still trying to find out the problem with ds that we just went to a&e and said that he won't stop crying and they were able to give more help or try us on the next step up of medication there and then.

I really hope his weight gain is ok. It is horrific when you just don't know how to help them and they can't ask. I wish I had more ideas to help. Just keep swimming.

I have just remembered a friend that said that they got the majority of milk intake done in the night as their kid had such a strong learned response to hate drinking. I know it sounds like a backwards step to feed more at night if you have got sleep managed well but it might get you through the bad patch and give your ds the opportunity to get used to the milk. And he must get used to it, there isn't really a choice.

Hi NeedMenInWhiteCoats, thank you so much for your response. Sorry for the late response - had a whole day of teething tantrums from my sweetheart DS. Poor thing.
Have not tried coconut milk but will probably have a go. Thanks for the tip.

Your friend is not wrong as we too found we'd have better chance of getting him to drink his Neocate whenever he'd be sleepy or just woken up. No surprise then that the dream feed is his best feed. We are seeing paediatricians and dieticians, am running out of ideas to help him!!!

I'm afraid when it comes to the yucky formulas like Nutramigen and Neocate it is simply a case of endurance. You just need to keep at it until they finally accept it. I know some mums started by mixing it with a bit of strawberry Nesquick to mask the taste and then gradually reduced the amount of Nesquick until eventually they would just drink the Neocate 'straight up' so to speak!

Confusedmum23 when you say that you can't find bread that doesn't contain dried egg white, are you talking about wheat-free breads? Most 'normal' bread doesn't contain egg but many freefrom ones do as they use it as a binding ingredient. If your child is allergic to wheat, milk and egg but is OK with soya (like mine) then I'd recommend Dietary Specials ciabatta rolls, available in white or brown in most supermarket freefrom sections.

Thanks! Didn't think to check the ingredients in NORMAL breads! Duh! X

Just to wade in on the Nutramigen vs Neocate debate. DS had nutramigen and tolerated it after a fashion although he was not interested in food in the slightest (and lived on thin air it seemed) so perhaps he was unbothered about it tasting vile. Our DD's paediatrician described Nutramigen as 'evil' tasting :) (I'd agree!) and said Neocate tastes better (based on having tasted himself and feedback from lots of folks) and also suggested the nesquik trick if needed. After lots of trial and error I'd also rate Kara (coconut) milk as the best grown up milk for cooking meals for the whole family - I made a really nice runny rice pudding (on the stove not oven so lots of calcium all round) that everyone really liked.

My latest discovery for finger food (asuming legumes and sesame are ok) is houmus with broccoli mashed in in a sandwich - lots of calcium again. Amazingly - it's delicious!