For whatever reason I struggle with this more than protein or veggie.
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Buttermilk biscuits, dinner rolls, crescent rolls, white rice, brown rice, wild rice, rice a roni, barley risotto (current favorite), penne with cream sauce, tortellini with pesto, garlic bread, Parmesan herb bread...we like our carbs.
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@LindsayLou: thanks! My sons favorites are rice, cous cous and quinoa (weirdo). But at 21 months old, they're all so messy so I always wonder what others do!
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@SweetiePie: I hear you! My 10 month old loves rice of any sort, but it's such a mess.
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Oatmeal is my go-to toddler carb because it's fast and healthy. Yesterday LO got cheesy chicken oatmeal. It can be messy though.
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Brown rice, rolls, pasta with diff sauces.
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So many of you are saying bread and I don't know why I didn't think of that. He loves wheat toast with a little butter!
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Trader Joe's frozen sides -- sweet potato gnocchi, potatoes/green beans/mushrooms, spelt risotto, sweet potato fries. All (relatively) healthy, got some other veggies mixed in, and both my kids love them!
They also both love orzo cooked in chicken broth, with a little parmesan and basil mixed in at the end!
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I struggle with this too, but I like ditalini pasta for something that's easy to keep in the fridge and isn't as messy as rice/quinoa. I often mix it with pureed butternut squash or sweet potato, peas, and butter/grated parmesan. It's also good plain!
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We eat sticky Asian rice - it's short grain sushi rice, also known as Calrose rice. The way I serve it to my son is to scoop some hot rice out, let it cool for a few minutes, spray a tiny bit of cooking spray or olive oil on my hands, and roll the rice into tiny balls. The oil prevents the rice from sticking to your hands and rolling the balls makes them neat and easy to pick up and eat. We always have hot rice sitting in our rice cooker though, so it's just easy. And it's DS' favorite - he would eat plain rice all day. I also make half a box of Annie's Mac and cheese or some pasta (mini bow tie or campanile are current winners) tossed in olive oil once a week and keep it in the fridge. Trader Joes makes a frozen gnocchi (alla Sorrentina) that takes 3 minutes to cook and it's the perfect bite size for toddlers too. Overall I don't worry about carb intake - he gets carby snacks all day so I mostly stress about protein (he is real iffy on meat) and veggies (currently not eating any).
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Same as @gingerbebe: I don't actually worry about adding a carb to her meals. She eats so many carbs already in her snacks (crackers, goldfish, granola bars) plus she has a pb&j almost every day, so I figure she's getting plenty.
If I feel like I need to bulk out what she is eating sometimes toast or crackers, or she likes hamburger rolls (but not the burger). And Mac and cheese.
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White rice, gf spaghetti with mizithra, mashed potatoes, potato salad.
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Rice (sometimes brown, sometimes Uncle Ben's garlic and butter or the 90 second packets) or Lipton's sidekicks.
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lately, my LOs have been eating a lot of rice, quinoa, butternut squash, sweet potato, white potatoes, and wheat flour string hoppers.
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Pasta, rice, or quinoa usually, occasionally something like a wrap or tortilla, or potatoes.
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Perogies, cheesy orzo, potatoes prepared various ways
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Rice, pasta, rolls, garlic bread, potatoes. DH won't eat anything "adventurous" like quinoa!
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Quinoa, pasta, jasmine rice, corn on the cob, roasted baby potatoes.
Tonight's dinner was grated zucchini and jarred tomato sauce tossed with diced "andouille" chicken sausage and bow tie pasta topped with Parmesan cheese.
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almost always rice since we have it in the rice cooker. but charlie also likes couscous and they love roasted sweet potatoes.
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various shapes of pasta (fusilli, macaroni, cartwheels, bowties, shells, just so many choices and so much fun!), noodles, brown rice, corn on the cob, and maybe couscous sometimes. My biggest struggle is with protein! Why do you struggle with carbs? Your LO doesn't like carbs?
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rice and pasta are my staples
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Quinoa, spelt pasta spirals, brown rice, baguette, home made biscuits. To a lesser extent: potatoes (mashed or roasted).
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Rice or potatoes
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Does it have to be a grain? There's plenty of carbs in potatoes, corn, peas, sweet potatoes, etc.
LO will eat basically any carb, including just plain bread or tortillas with dinner.
Our favorite grains are faro, quinoa, winterberries and white rice.
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Couscous (my almost 4 year old's favorite), quick pasta sides (Knorr's). I stockpile these. Target used to carry frozen rice. I would buy lots of them. With veggies, I buy the Target steam bags. It makes getting dinner on the table faster.
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My youngest will eat carbs like bread, rolls, pasta and roasted potatoes (cut into wedges/cubes). My oldest though just simply doesn't really like carbs except rice.
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@gingerbebe: thanks for that idea of rolling the rice into balls!!
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These are all great ideas. On my phone so I can't reply to everyone but I've read them and appreciate them.
@irene: he definitely likes carbs except potatoes. Little weirdo doesn't like them much. I think it's texture.
I struggle because I always seem to have a protein and a veggie on hand and they are pretty easy to make. I should clarify I don't cook a ton. I don't like it. So I freeze batches of things he likes, like meatballs. And I buy "healthy" frozen items like Plum Organics chicken/veggie/quinoa meatballs.
Veggies are easy because frozen or fresh I can just steam and he loves all veggies.
Grains/carbs seem to stump me because I don't always have them on hand. So I'm just trying to get ideas from all of you of things I can make every few days and reheat or freeze and reheat
Plus the ones he likes are so messy and annoying but I do them because he likes them. I thought maybe there was something I just wasn't thinking of! And there are!
Everyone has been raving about the instant pot on the "products that live up to hype" thread and it's making me wonder if that could make life easier. -
@SweetiePie: In the Asian section of supermarkets, they usually sell shelf stable microwaveable bowls of sticky rice. Or you can order these from Amazon, same thing:
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You can make big batches of rice, quinoa, mashed potatoes, couscous, and rolls/ cornbread muffins (or any muffins) and freeze them! The grain stuff tastes fine to me microwaved, but breads I leave out to thaw and then put them in the oven for a minute to crisp up. I have never had a lot of success with premade packaged rice/ mashed potatoes, etc- they don't taste right to me.
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I would eat pasta for every meal except breakfast of it wouldn't make me extremely fat, so pasta is always my go to
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My 14mo is obsessed with roasted sweet potatoes right now. I use this recipe (but I sub olive oil for coconut oil, because I don't have food-grade coconut oil on hand):
http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1013488-coconut-oil-roasted-sweet-potatoesIt's a quick prep. I cook them for 40 minutes, and go easy on the sugar. One batch lasts us the week. She will seriously just shove these in her mouth, one after the other.
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@magnoliamama42: those look so good!!!
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@nana87: I know you're a fellow city girl. How do you avoid the temptation to just order in every meal???
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@SweetiePie: lol, it's hard! We def eat take out more than we should, but dh is the cook so I rarely am the one responsible for feeding us. We do blue apron so that the meal planning is done for us in part, that helps-- were motivated not to waste the food!
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Trader Joe's Multigrain flatbreads. They're like a pita. Definitely no mess!
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@SweetiePie: I isut read your response about not cooking much. Me neither, I'm horrible. Trader Joe's frozen rice is also really easy and turns out well. And I love their party sized meatballs or "just chicken" for LO.
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@Mrs Green Grass: Seeing so many trader joes references in this thread! We have a couple of them in the city but none are particularly close so I don't venture. Maybe I should try it once. It's just annoying to ride the subway with bags of groceries or to pay $30 round trip for a cab. Hmmm. But I'm really curious now!
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This doesn't help with the mess, but you can batch cook quinoa and rice and freeze in silicone muffin liners. Then when they're frozen just pop out of the liners and store in a gallon ziplock in the freezer. Then it's handy.
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@SweetiePie: I see! If you steam frozen veggies anyway, what I do is, I have a steamer that fits on top of my pot. I'd cook my pasta in the pot, and put veggies in the steamer and put it on top of the pot, so the steam comes up and steam the veggies in the steamer. One stone kills two birds, and there is no massive cooking in there.... just boiling water and washing the pot afterwards, which you can put in the dishwasher lol. Just a thought
Plus the ones he likes are so messy and annoying but I do them because he likes them. I thought maybe there was something I just wasn't thinking of! And there are!
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