Healthy high calorie food ideas!

[RhubarbCrumbled]

DS, 1 ,has been referred to a dietician after slow growth this year. She's recommended increasing his calorie intake with extra puddings and snacks including peanut butter, cheese, milk, avocado. Can anybody point me to high calorie but healthy ways to do this and with a variety of food groups that's not just dairy.

We like milk and cheese but like variety too!

How old is your DS rhubarb? Have you tried oily fish? Things like sardines on toast? Salmon fish fingers?

He's 1. I'll try him with oily fish as he quite likes tuna, salmon and mackerel.

Cheesey crackers
Butter puff biscuits
Add cream to everything (pasta, potatoes, porridge etc).
Full fat dairy (milk, yoghurts etc)
Dessert after dinner, every day, ice cream, choc spread on crackers, whatever he'll eat.
Don't give him squash drinks or fruit juices, they'll reduce his appetite, offer water or milk.
Investigate if he can have fortified supplement (Fortini is the name), it's high calorie and nutritionally complete.
Have his iron levels checked - start iron if necessary.
I've been here ( can you tell ) and while it's important to be healthy it's also important to pack on the pounds while they are still so young so I just gave everything to him without worrying too much about the healthy bit, if that makes sense.

Thanks for all those! He only really got the hang of proper food a couple of months ago so it's been a bit of a struggle to get anything into him apart from breast milk. He's had all his levels of everything checked and they're all normal so the growth problem is only down to him burning more calories than he's taking in. I'm currently making macaroni cheese with apple crumble and custard to follow!

Any tips on getting him to drink cows milk rather than breast feeding? That's something else the dietician said he should be doing.

Why did the dietician say that? If you're happy to breastfeed him then why on earth switch his milk to cow's milk? Of course, if you're ready to stop then fair play.
And I shall watch for tips as my 2.5 year old still only has breastmilk or water, will not drink cows milk. (obv she eats food though!)

Nuts are very calorific and very nutritious. At this age I wouldn't give them whole, but you can add ground almonds to porridge/stews/casseroles (they thicken it just like flour) for extra fat. Also you can sub ground almonds for up to about half the flour in any cake type recipe perfectly successfully and it's got tonnes of calories, vitamins etc.

Douse his veg in either melted butter or olive oil.

Coconut milk/cream is another option, either for mild curry type meals or instead of normal milk in rice pudding.

If he likes fried aubergine slices (as a bit of a wild card) they soak up VAST amounts of olive oil in the frying.

Eggs? You can make really buttery scrambled eggs and they are GORGEOUS. Use LOTS of butter!

How do his height/weight centiles compare rhubarb? Has he lost weight or just slowed down on curve? Is it possible he's just naturally small (what are you and DP like size-wise?) Are you bf at night? i was still feeding ds2 at 12m and also at night (because he was tiny and had no interest in solid food and I wanted to get as much into him as possible) - I stopped bf altogether at about 13m though, and then he started getting more interested in food, that might be all it takes for you too...

Once DS2 was eating more I used to make flaked salmon in creamy mashed potato, poached eggs every morning with lots of butter mixed in, he had custard, cottage pie with super creamy mash (again), porridge with cream and sugar...

And of course don't buy lean meat! Normal mince, not lean steak stuff, chicken thighs not breast, pork belly/shoulder, lamb breast etc etc

Cauliflower and broccoli cheese?
A low carb way of making this (that therefore happens to be hugely fatty) is as follows:
Put equal parts cream and cream cheese in a saucepan and add grated cheddar to taste. Warm and stir as the cheese melts. Use as you would a normal cheese sauce eg for cauli cheese/fish pie/pasta bake/veg crumble etc. It's absolutely divine, and so easy.

Spread butter/mayo thickly on any bread/crackers

Could you put him on 4 equally spaced proper meals in the day, poss plus snacks if he eats at small intervals? Butter popcorn?

You can even slosh cream into full fat greek yogurt

The advice from the dietician is a little odd. Have a read of this and see what you think

Do you think talking all of this through with a BFC might help? Have you got the helpline numbers?

And avoid whole grain everything

Thanks for all the suggestions, it's really useful. As a bit if background, he dropped from the 50th to the 2nd centile over the last year but is now clinging to the 2nd. His height and weight have always correlated and he doesn't look ill or malnourished in any way. The paediatrician referred to the dietician after not being able to find anything wrong with him after many tests and checks, not even a vitD deficiency which he said was unusual! The only thug they think might be a problem is that he's not getting enough calories as he's always been very active and doesn't really sleep much during the day. And myself and DH are pretty small and were both very small babies. DS was 2lb heavier than my birth weight and 1lb heavier than his brother when he was born!

I was really surprised at the suggestions to switch to cows milk over breast feeding too! He's just started sleeping through so is eating more during the day now, but still has 4 feeds a day. He's not a fan of cups or water but will drink a little bit of cows milk. I'm a SAHM so it's not really an issue to keep breast feeding and I'm happy to carry on.

We're back at the hospital for a check in a month so i'll monitor his weight to make sure his weight isn't too crazy for his height. I'm also going to see the breast feeding group next week to have a chat wit them about the cows milk thing. Neither if us are ready to stop yet, but will keep offering cows milk as a drink too.

Thanks again for all this!

All of this could be perfectly normal but I think you are right to ask a BFC about bfing and weight gain, it might also be worth getting him checked for tongue tie.

Have a read of this too. A lot of it is aimed at parents of younger babies but I'm sure there is some information in there that you can still use