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Hi! I’m Lisa Krone and I’m here for Best Epicurean on behalf of expertvillage.com and
today we are going to talk about food portions for toddlers. Now toddlers don’t eat as
much as an elementary school kid, high school or an adult. You want to make sure you don’t
give them too much but you want to make sure you have enough protein packed into your dish,
so I have a few dishes that I’ve made here and I am going to show you what size you are
going to give to a toddler. One of the first things that I made was some pasta with Parmesan,
a little bit of garlic because you want to start to prepare their pallet to eat other
things besides baby food and it is very little garlic, so they just get a little inkling
of spices. I did not put any salt or pepper because a lot of times toddlers don’t care
for pepper but they do like garlic because they get it in their restaurant food. So if
my toddler is going to weigh anywhere between about 20 and 50 pounds, what I would do when
I do pasta is I give them about this much and put it in a bowl of about this size. I
like to use paper bowls with toddlers because a lot of times this could end up on the floor
for some reason. That is what I would give a toddler. If I’ve made my toddler a little
mini pizza here like I did here, this is still too big for a toddler, so what I would do
is I have good protein here, a some meat on here and some carbohydrate, and I cut that
in half and the other thing I would do is I would cut that up probably into squares
because toddlers have little hands and little hands need to be able to pick up the food.
You want to make sure the food cools. If the food is too hot, your toddler is not going
to eat it. What I do is I grab a really nice paper plate and I place the food on here like
this and maybe you might want to add a carrot or piece of celery or something like that
with it just to kind of break up what they are eating and that is how I would serve it
to them.