fussy 3 year old food ideas wanted

[bossyboop]

Fussy 3 year old, well not totally fussy but struggling and not wanting to buy a zillion ingredients to make annabel karmel recipes. Lunches are fine, eats sandwiches and fruit.

Gone off cereal, is there a breakfast alternative to toast?

Also need teatime ideas. The only gooey and messy food she will eat is tinned spaghetti and pizza. Wont eat most veg especially mashed potato, wont eat pasta in sauce just pasta with cheese, wont eat baked beans, eats chicken and bacon but no other meat. Likes rice and curry if most of sauce is scraped off strangely enough! Need something other than oven chips and chicken dippers/fish fingers.

She likes chicken on sticks, any food on sticks ideas?!

Any ideas to help dd to gain weight?

I am trying to go back to just dishing up the same as what we have to get her to try new things and starting to get her to help me prepare the food in a bid to stimulate her interest as well as telling her rabbits eat whatever it is, the whole grow big and strong, run fast, jump high thing has lost appeal! Seeing some progress but could still do with some quick, easy, simple and cheap ideas!

Breakfast- scrambled egg or omelette?
Fruit salad and yoghurt.
Cereal bar

Dinner Kebabs with chicken, prawns and peppers, tomatoes, courgette-since she likes sticks. She could help you make them and then help you take them off the skewer when cooked- may help her try some more veg.

Rice or plain pasta with peas,sweetcorn and cubes of chicken,turkey etc.

Baked potato with cheese?

Pitta pockets with mild chilli- she might like dipping.

I agree that talking about what each food does can help. My dd is not a fussy eater but used to be a very lazy eater. She can now tell you e.g that carrots help you see in the dark ( and that's whay rabbits need them as they live in burrows), cheese is helping her bones grow etc.

breakfast - try crumpets, muffins, bagels, mini pancakes, eggy bread?

DS is 3 and also fussy, so what we've started doing is giving combination of things we know he likes with stuff we want him to eat. So e.g. he loves pasta and will eat bolognese with it, so we've started eating bolognese with rice to get him onto rice. He loves sausages so we've started having them with veggie cous-cous, to try and get him onto cous-cous. - I know these won't necessarily help you, but it might give you ideas for things you can mix and match. - If you're anything like us, you've been trying to cook around your DD, doing stuff you hope she'll like, then months down the line, wonder how come you never eat the stuff you used to love??? - and suddenly re-introducing them means they won't eat them! -
noodles/spaghetti always goes down well with DS, so I get extra veggies in him that way - altho' again, not so easy for you, if she prefers pasta dry.

Mini jkt pots out of new pots, or just new pots. mini pizzas made with muffins as the base.

• I've got a few AK recipe books and like you find they're a bit too fussy for RL, (great if somebody can watch the children whilst you're slaving in the kitchen!) - I have also got the Gina Ford baby and toddler cookbook (am hoping this thread is a fairly neutral GF one!) and it's actually a lot more practical - you can tell it's written by somebody who has experience of cooking for the children she is looking after IYKWIM - worth a look if your local library has it just for ideas maybe? It's just a practical non-fussy recipe book(if you can be bothered to read another book - am always a bit wary of suggesting books as am faily booked out myself having 2 sleepless and weaning reluctant babies!!!!)

Banana bread for breakfast? You could leave out the chocolate if you want.

130g wholemeal self raising flour
55g unsalted butter
1 free range egg
2 mashed bananas
3 tablespoon crunchy peanut butter
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
50g chocolate chips or broken chocolate pieces (I use mixture of dark and white)

Mix all ingredients together and cook at 180 degrees for 35-40 minutes in a greased loaf tin or until a skewer comes out clean.