Food for 1 year old

[ExcitingTimes2021]

My baby girl has just turned one. Originally set out to do BLW but it turns out I’m no cook and it quickly lead be to pouches/dinky dinners. Now she is 1 I’m really keen to ween off these pouches and get her eating more solids but I’m running into the same issues as before. I ain’t no cook!

Can those super mums share their best recipes for baby? Meal ideas and so forth….

she is a Velcro baby so loathes to be put down. Until recently she would happily be in the sling but now she is starting to walk so wants to be up then down, up then down! So leaves minimal time to actually get food ready. Me and my partner both work full time and shift works, and to make thing work we often have to work opposite shifts so we don’t have an extra set of hands. Until recently I found it easier to skip most meals for myself until she has gone to bed! Obviously not ideal but I feel need to get a handle on this food situation.

i WANT to love to cook. I just hate it at the moment. X

I tend to give my 1yo similar to what we're eating now - within reason. What do you tend to eat? Do they have a favorite punch? You could try a simple version of that as finger food, or start by giving soft cooked veg to get them used to it.

Just reread your post, if you eat after she's gone to bed could you save some of that for the next day?

As above, I used to just put aside what we had and gave it to mine the next day.
She always had porridge or cereal for breakfast, sandwich/fruit/few crisps for lunch and leftovers for dinner.
And she was always a fan of a baby ‘fry up’ if there were no leftovers - scrambled egg, mushrooms, beans and toast, something like that.

I used to help her a little bit but mainly left her to it as I knew she was still getting nutrition and calories from breast milk - over time she ate more and more as she was able to feed herself more skilfully.

To give an idea of what she might eat (just to say I'm still on mat leave so more time to cook):

Breakfast: shredded wheat with fruit, or egg on toast

Lunch: egg muffin/pin wheel/sandwich/boiled egg with cooked veg

Dinner: baked sweet potato with cheese and beans, fish fingers and chips (very rarely!), pasta, curry, lamb tagine, chilli. But like I said, most of these are what I cook for us and she just gets the same!

Our two loves the Annabel Karmel recipes at that age and beyond, and they're super easy to prepare. Maybe try some of those?

I would say batch coming is your friend. Things like bolognaise and curry's work well.

I am a bit like you (don't want to do elaborate cooking). My solution is basically just meat + veggies thrown into a frying pan. It cooks in about ten minutes.

I feed her organic ground meat ordered online from a farm, rotating between chicken, turkey thigh (don't like turkey breast), lamb and beef. I have loads of herbs in the pantry and just switch them up e.g. cloves for lamb, then Italian seasoning for chicken, ginger for beef etc. I find ground meat is the easiest way for her to consume meat otherwise it's a little hard for her to chew as she still has no teeth.

I also have a selection of frozen veggies in the freezer- spinach peppers broccoli cauliflower etc - which I alternate. I have stopped buying many fresh veggies as she eats so little it's hard to get the quantities right so it ends up either going to waste or we eat the same vegetable every day for the week as it takes so long to finish it!

My go-to breakfast which is easy and requires no cooking is avocado mashed with tinned sardines and some red sauerkraut. For some reason the red sauerkraut is much nicer than normal sauerkraut. There is probably quite a lot of salt in that meal though so I don't do it every day. Sometimes breakfast is just last nights leftovers.

If my DD didn't have an egg allergy I would give her eggs for breakfast. I also think oats with milk maybe banana too is probably a decent breakfast although don't do it myself.

I keep lots of frozen veg, it's cheap and easy to prepare. Boil a potato with the veg, mash it with cheese/milk/butter, add some meat (I use pre cooked or whatever we're having) and it all makes an easy, filling nutritious meal.

Toddler doesn't always have what we're having which is always the advice I see. He eats too early for us so I do him his own meals.

Mashed potatoes with a various of chopped up veg and some kind of shredded meat is my 'go to'. I'll also put some finger ve out too (mostly broccoli florets, carrot batons or sweetcorn).

Breakfast is some variation of cereal, toast, yoghurt, fruit, eggs or pancakes at the weekend
Lunch is usually cold stuff like a sandwich or wrap, hummus, mini breadsticks, cucumber, avocado, cherry tomato
Afternoon snack is usually a banana or maybe another fruit
Dinner is typically heated up leftovers of what we had the night before, if it’s not something they’d eat then I’d do something easy like bung a chicken breast in the oven and serve it with pesto pasta and peas

DS always had what I had without any added salt or spice. I froze mini portions and then just put it in the microwave. I couldn't cook but I was determined to learn so DS wasn't eating processed foods and learn I did. BBC Good Food was an excellent source of easy recipes for me and even now, 14 years later, I still use it all the time. There are plenty of recipes that don't involve a lot of prep and frozen prepped veg is your friend if you are tight on pairs of hands.

Cereals/toast/boiled eggs/porridge for breakfast with some form of fruit.

Lunch/tea: various sandwiches, baked sweet potato with baked beans and cheese, pasta with various homemade sauces, veggie sausages mash and veg, fish fingers mash and veg, pasta and green veg with soft cheese as a sauce, omelette, beans on toast, scrambled egg on toast.

Aside from the above she also just has whatever I've cooked for us if I've managed to make something decent - I always make enough to freeze half for another day. Eg chilli, curry, tagine etc.

Tips for speed:

• boil multiple eggs at a time, they keep in the fridge fine for 3-4 days
• steam lots of veg to serve as a side with sausages/fish fingers/whatever. Keeps in a Tupperware in the fridge for 5 days or so
• bake several sweet potatoes at once, again keep fine in fridge for up to 5 days
• don't worry about slightly odd meals, they just need to get used to different tastes and are happy with strange combos! Focus on food groups ie ensuring some protein, carb and veg with each meal.

Pretty much everything gets finished off with a yoghurt and some sort of fruit for pudding.

I’m not a very good cook either OP, so I sympathise.

Have you got the What Mummy Makes book (Rebecca Wilson?) My 20 month old is a tricky eater - it’s not so much that he’s picky but he doesn’t seem to have a brilliant appetite and it doesn’t take much to put him off his food, but he’s really seemed to enjoy some of the recipes from this and they are very easy to follow. The chilli, tuna and avocado melts and leek pasta are firm favourites.

I really do mean this kindly but it really isn’t difficult to learn how to cook. Google everything! Don’t pay for recipe books just use your phone

start of with simple meals and just experiment as you learn

batch cook, feed them whatever you have etc

At 13 months DD basically just eats what we eat. During the week she eats at nursery but she has things like pasta, cottage pie, chicken curry etc. Her dinner with us is light as she has eaten loads at nursery.
When I’m feeding her I do sandwiches for lunch, or pasta, maybe a snacky selection of cheese, hummus, oat cakes and fruit. For dinner she has things like fish and veg, pie and mash, omelette with different veg, fish pie, tuna pasta.

Gousto is so good for this. Meals for 2 people will feed you plus a bit for the baby. Just feed her what you eat. You'll learn to cook along the way too and the recipes are very clear.

My twins are 11 months old and I mostly just cook the same for the four of us now. Slow cooker meals are great, as they can eat theirs early and we can have ours after when we are ready for it. Sounds like slow cooker meals could help you too? Ours loved slow-cooked lamb or beef stew.

The What Mummy Makes recipe book is good and has some nice ideas if you are not a particularly confident cook. There are also some nice weaning/toddler recipes on the good food website.

My twins love this Good Food Cottage Pie recipe. We just adapt slightly by using the no salt stock and leave out the optional wine. It makes loads, so you can freeze plenty for later. I made one last week and we freeze 3 twin-size portions ready for them to have again on busy weeks. Could be useful if you work shifts/long hours, as would any other batch cooking recipes really. I often also batch cook pasta sauces, so you only have to cook the pasta and warm the sauce then.

Here are some of my twins’ favorites:

Easy Baby Pasta Sauce

Slow-cooked lamb with sweet potato mash

Salmon Curry

Prawn risotto

These can be adapted to make them a bit cheaper too by using cheaper meats/fish, or the curry/risotto could be made veggie by adding in some extra veggies. Hope that helps. We’ve eaten all of these (except the pasta sauce) ourselves too and they are actually really nice recipes that I’d happily have again with or without the kids!