Breakfast Ideas for Baby-Led Weaning

Katie Ferraro (1m 17s):

Hey, there I'm Katie Ferraro, Registered Dietitian, college nutrition professor and mom of seven specializing in baby led weaning here on the baby led weaning made easy podcast. I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, leading you with the competence and knowledge. You need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby led. Weaning. What should I feed my baby for breakfast? I don't know why breakfast. This is just a meal that I feel like a lot of parents struggle with. And I feel you, a lot of times, we don't get to sleep as much as we want and the baby wakes up and they're hungry.

Katie Ferraro (1m 57s):

And do I do milk first or food first? And so hang tight. This episode has got a few breakfast ddeas that work great for baby-led weaning. Now I want to start out by saying that one of the best things about feeding babies, we're offering foods to babies. If you will, is that babies don't really know what quote, unquote breakfast foods are, right? So like my mom will come over and she's like, what are you doing? And I'm making food for this baby. That's coming over. She like, you're making lamb and beets and buckwheat for the baby. I'm like, heck yeah, it's nine o'clock in the morning. Who cares? Babies don't have social norms around what type of foods they should eat at what time of day. So, one thing I want to encourage you to do is if you're taking the time to prepare new foods for your babies, take those extra portions, put them, I use the easy-peasy.

Katie Ferraro (2m 43s):

Mini-map put them in a mini mat at night after dinner, put a lid on it, put it in the fridge and your breakfast is ready for the next day. Just use leftovers. One of the best things you can do is to prep that breakfast ahead of time. And another thing I find that on my trainings and workshops, parents are sometimes surprised to learn that even six months old babies, you can get to a point where if your baby wakes up in the morning, you can start the day with food. Six months might be a little early, cause they're not really proficient at eating food, but certainly remember by eight months of age with all of my babies, when they woke up in the morning, as long as I was prepared, meaning the food was ready and on the table, you can start the day with food. You don't have to start with the milk feed. You do what works for you as far as your milk scheduling goes.

Katie Ferraro (3m 23s):

And we have lots of episodes on the podcast about scheduling milk feeds, but it's okay to start with food, especially as your baby starts getting more proficient at eating, and then you can start moving the milk behind meals. So we just did an episode all about moving milk behind meals. If a lot of other episodes, if you go to BLW podcast.com and you just search milk, it'll bring up some of the episodes about scheduling milk feeds, but don't be fearful of starting the day with food. In my anecdotal experience, babies who have a good breakfast kind of set the stage for eating well for the rest of the day. And as your baby gets older, they certainly can recognize and respond to their feelings of hunger. So bringing them to the table to start the day with breakfast is a great idea.

Katie Ferraro (4m 3s):

What I'll normally do is get the breakfast mat out of the refrigerator, pop it in the microwave, and then while it's reheating, they'll bring it out, put it on the table to cool back down to room temperature, then go get the baby, change the baby, get ready for the day, bring the baby down to the table and then put the baby in the high chair and then have the room temperature meal, ready to go. And again, it doesn't have to look like quote unquote breakfast foods, but we want to talk quote, unquote, breakfast foods. I'm just going to share the three different categories of food that I put in one of those easy peasy, mini mats, that's this original silicone suction baby led weaning mat. It looks like a smiley face and it's made by the company called easy peasy. So there's two, two ounce portion pockets that kind of look like eyeballs and then a four ounce portion pocket that looks like a smiley face.

Katie Ferraro (4m 45s):

And so in my programs, I generally teach. And if you guys have taken my free online video workshop called BABY-LED WEANING FOR BEGINNERS, I show you how we portion the foods out, but I generally will put the larger portion of being the carbohydrate containing foods. So I'll do one portion of carbohydrate or starchy food, a serving of fruit or vegetable, and then a serving of protein. Now, to be honest, sometimes for breakfast to have the energy or the leftover food to have three different foods for breakfast. No. And is it the end of the world? Now? A lot of times you just serve a baby led weaning breakfast out of, I use the mini bowls or the tiny bulls, depending upon the portion size and only having one food for breakfast is perfectly fine as well. But if you are following my framework for building a balanced baby led weaning plate, the one that I teach about in the free workshop, it's a small portion of protein, a small portion of fruit or vegetable, and then a small portion of starch.

Katie Ferraro (5m 33s):

So let's start with the protein. What kind of protein can babies eat at breakfast? Well, any protein that you have on hand, if you have my hundred FIRST FOODS list inside of there, there are 20 different types of protein foods, half plant, half animal ish. Any of those work for baby led weaning. And if you skip the protein at breakfast, six and seven months of age, it doesn't really matter. But a lot of you guys recognize and realize, huh, eggs are a really good protein food for babies. And so I know there's lots and of content out there about eggs on one of our most downloaded podcast episode is actually episode 49. It's called eggs seven easy ways to safely offer your baby eggs. So I talk about scrambling hard boiling, frying it and strips doing baked egg cups, making banana pancakes with eggs, a French toast, and then doing an kind of modified egg salad sandwich for babies.

Katie Ferraro (6m 17s):

Again, that's episode 49. If you want more info about making eggs, safe for babies, but any of the meats that you've been trying out, you know, the more practice your baby has with meat, the more proficient they will become. So don't be scared to offer leftover portions of meat for your baby for breakfast. Just remember that we always want to re heat meats to add or slightly above room temperature. We don't serve cold meats to babies because when the protein and the fat solidifies, it can be really hard for babies to swallow. So get a lot of that extra added liquid, a lot of the low sodium broth. If you made your baby a pork roast, you've got like a hundred servings of it. Put some of it on breakfast. Eggs of course are like what most people think about for protein at breakfast, but you could do the meat or any of the thinned out nut butters.

Katie Ferraro (6m 57s):

If you want to reintroduce the peanut protein to your baby or almond protein to your baby, do the thinned out nut butter process that I teach, put it on a preloaded spoon and your baby can safely eat that. So that's the small protein portion of the mat. And if you want to check that mat out again, it's called the ezpz, mini mat and I have an affiliate discount code that always works for 10% off. So KATIE10 at ezpzfun.com always works for 10% off. Sometimes they have bigger sales. I'll tell you guys about those, but at any given time, if you're in the U S at least you can use KATIE10 at ezpzfun.com To get the mini mat or anything on their site. Also get those lids. They have lids for the mini mat now, which is great for portioning extra foods ahead of time. So let's go over to the other little, I pocket the other two ounce portion in the mini mat for baby-led weaning for breakfast.

Katie Ferraro (7m 40s):

I recommend for all meals doing one serving of fruit or vegetable. Now fruit is pretty easy. Most families are like, I'm fine with fruit, okay. To kind of struggle with, well, what sort of vegetables should I feed my baby? Again? I have a hundred FIRST FOODS listed as 20 fruits. You can make for baby Led Weaning 20 vegetables for baby Led Weaning. And I encourage parents to try to incorporate those vegetables in the morning meal, just to get in the habit of offering your baby as many vegetable offerings as you're doing fruit offerings. Okay. Fruit is fine, but we don't need to do fruit every day or every meal. And if you feel like your baby is starting to favor fruit, remember it's perfectly fine for you to take a fruit vacation. I did a whole podcast episode number 209 about a fruit vacation and how to help babies who overly favorite fruit.

Katie Ferraro (8m 23s):

So lots of ideas about veggies in there, but as far as the portions go for vegetables, fruits in the mornings, if you need ideas, the a hundred FIRST FOODS list, you can grab that on my free online video training workshop. That's the one where I show you how to build a balanced BLW plate. That workshop is the sign-up has that baby led weaning dot O it's a one hour workshop, but it's packed with lots of kind of visuals showing you how to make some of this stuff come to life for your own baby. Again, that's baby led weaning.com to get signed up for that free workshop. Get the a hundred FIRST FOODS list with the fruits and the vegetables cause want to do both. But zucchini is one of my favorite breakfast, vegetables and zucchini works great. I love to make these zucchini egg cups. You can make them ahead of time in muffin, tins, or mini muffin, tins, freeze them really easily.

Katie Ferraro (9m 7s):

It's got some vegetables in there. If you make it with the shredded potato, it's got some carbohydrate in there. It's also got the protein from the egg. So you kind of have like one little food that works with all three food groups, those combination foods, though, with the multiple textures, I really don't do those until phase two of baby-led weaning. So generally after your baby has been eating for about eight weeks, you've really mastered the single isolated strips of the first eight week foods. Then we kind of move into those combination foods, but I'll link my BLW zucchini egg cup recipe for you on the show notes page for this episode, which you can find@blwpodcast.com/239. So let's move to the bigger portion of the plate. And I like to use the four ounce portion of the mini mat to offer the carbohydrate or starchy food, right?

Katie Ferraro (9m 50s):

Cause babies need a slightly greater than 50% of their calories eventually coming from carbohydrate. And we don't obviously want to serve them sugar or refined grain products, but whole grains and other starchy carbohydrate containing foods were great for baby-led weaning. One of my favorites is oatmeal. He pretty much put anything in oatmeal. I love to use it as a vehicle to introduce other foods like for example, canned pumpkin. I have a whole episode 47, that's all about oatmeal and how your baby can safely self-feed oatmeal. And I explained the different ways to make oatmeal safe for baby Led Weaning, but you can do any of the whole grains that are on my a hundred FIRST FOODS list. You can make them into a porridge or a hot cereal. There's 20 different starchy foods in that category on the a hundred FIRST FOODS list, you can do those starchy foods, offering them as a hot cereal, warm cereal on a preloaded spoon, offer that to the baby and let them sell feed.

Katie Ferraro (10m 38s):

And a lot of the porridges, I kind of share in that free workshop about how, when they cool, you can form them into little logs about the size of your adult pinky finger, and actually can make a finger food out of the different whole grains that your baby can pick up and feed to themselves. And then lastly, I just want to mention waffles and pancakes. I know pancakes get a lot of play in baby Led Weaning. I just completed this one year long advanced pediatric food allergy course for dieticians. And one of the final projects was we had to make a recipe using X number of grams of one of the nut proteins for like an oral food challenge for a child with food allergies. And so many people made pancakes. And I was like, you guys, there's lots of other ways to make foods and finger foods for babies besides pancakes, but pancakes are great. But the problem with commercial pancake mix is that it tends to be too high in sodium.

Katie Ferraro (11m 21s):

So I love waffles and I love the ideas of pancakes, but I have a great recipe for a dry mix that I make in my kitchen. And I store it and you just add one cup of buttermilk and one egg and you have pancake or waffle batter with no added salt. It's so wonderful. I wrote a whole blog post about this called why I broke up with commercial pancake mix. And the answer is because it has too much salt, but I share this recipe and I want you guys to grab this because like, this is the one base recipe it's so nice to have. Cause you can make homemade baby led, weaning pancakes or waffles without worrying about the sodium at your, and then it makes a lot like a big batch. So you can like do it over and over and try lots of different types of these foods for your baby for breakfast. So again, I'll link to that.

Katie Ferraro (12m 1s):

And then all of the other resources that I recommended is spells linking out to the recipes for some of these in the other episodes, all on the show notes for this episode, which you can find@blwpodcast.com/239. And hopefully give you a little break as far as having to think of new Breakfast Ideas for baby-led weaning. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.