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Correct Portions to Serve a Toddler

Get tips for serving the correct portions to toddlers in this free online video.

- Correct Portions to Serve a Toddler

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Video Transcript

Hi! I’m Lisa Krone and I’m here for Best Epicurean 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.