tips on introducing more lumpy/dried foods

[Portlypenguin]

Hiya,
My 11month old baby with cow's milk protein allergy is still tiny (o.4th centile) but generally doing better than previously.
His appetite is very very intermittent but on good days he will eat about 1/2 7mo sized jars worth of food. He is very difficult about non smooth foods, although CAN eat them as eats finger foods like breadsticks, rusks, cooked veg etc.
e.g. Tonight I made some baby star pasta and a tomato based pasta sauce. There was plenty of sauce but he utterly rejected it and spat it out immediately. I know the sauce is acceptable because I've done the same before with whizzed up pasta.
LO hardly eats anything at nursery for main courses because they are trying to encourage him to eat mashed foods that are a bit more chunky and he won't have it.
Any tips on lump introducing? Or on getting him to eat any meat or fish that isn't pureed into a sauce?
Thanks.

Are you spoon feeding it in? I wouldn't because he can't control the lumps. Finger food he can.

Let him explore more with his hands. Try foods which are more cut up and not mixed. Let him make mess, pick stuff up and explore.

Ds had reflux and was a bit funny with lumpy food but fine with finger foods. In the end I didn't do the whole stages lumpy thing and went straight to food that was cut up into fist sized chunks for him to pick up.

So try pieces of roast chicken, lamb burgers, chunks of fish. Also proper pasta, not those funny star shapes (are they tiny ones?). He'll gag a lot but gagging, which is very noisy - choking is silent and the one to worry about, gagging is all part of the learning process.

I agree about the tiny pasta. dd will chomp on a normal piece of pasta but when I whizzed some into a favourite sauce she refused it.

For pasta, I found fusilli and penne the easiest for young babies. If you LO will eat cooked veg as finger food, try those instead.

I don't think you should worry at all if he would eat finger foods. Have you asked nursery to try just let him scoop the lumpy food himself? Are they whizzing everything up for him? If it's a stew, he can pick up the chunks, iyswim? If it's a cottage pie type of thing, then he can scoop. It'd be very messy, I'm sure no worse then messy play!

Uhmm, not sure what happened to my reply from yesterday.

Summary: Will try all your suggestions! Previous attempts to give pastas to pick up have led to pasta-sauce covered bullets hitting the walls in rejection. Will also d/w nursery various strategies.