Friday, January 14, 2011

Where's the beef?


It's right there - in Chicken's hands!

When people find out that Chicken eats "real" food, they always ask, "But, not meat, right?" Wrong. One of Chicken's first foods was chicken. She has tried beef, turkey, chicken and pork in various forms and preparations. When we first started out with BLW, I offered Chicken strips of whatever meat we were having for dinner and she'd gum away at them and suck out any juices. She's also had lots of ground meats and also some all natural sausages. Recently, I've been shredding up chicken rather than giving her big pieces and she's done great with it. We don't eat much beef, so she's definitely had more poultry than anything else.

I made steak the other night, though, and I was faced with a dilemma. Steak isn't really shred-able (at least not the cheap and rather unskillfully cooked pieces that I was serving) and I was nervous about Chicken's new practice of using her teeth to tear off pieces of food. I've become pretty confident that she can manage her food, but a piece of tough steak in her mouth made me nervous.

At first, I gave her a strip of meat that happened to be the outside edge of my steak. She tasted it and tossed it. She explored the other stuff on her tray and discovered baked potato, for which she went nuts. Who wouldn't?? She searched her tray for the teensiest smidgens of potato and gobbled them up. Then I gave her another piece of meat that was from the middle of my steak and had less marinade on it. She tasted it and seemed to like it much better. The meat was tough enough that she couldn't tear a bite off, though she did try. She gummed away at it, sucking at the marinade and the iron-rich meat juices. She didn't really use her teeth at all, but stuck it right where a new tooth is coming in. I think it must have felt great on her irritated gums.

I've been wanting a burger, so we took Chicken to the diner last night and I got my greasy fix. I order some steamed vegetables for Chicken, but she wasn't interested. I gave her a few bits of the greasy beefy goodness that I'd ordered and she gobbled them up. She played with the vegetables and ate some, but probably would've eaten the whole burger, bun and all, if I'd let her!

As I said, we rarely eat beef so I'm not worried about her having some tiny morsels of burger occasionally. Luckily, she really does like healthy foods. We had wild-caught flounder the other night and she really enjoyed it. Flounder is great because it's flaky and soft*. It's also low in mercury, which is important.

*Be sure to check fish for tiny pin bones before offering any pieces to your little one!

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