Making breakfast interesting for kids ~ Mini Breakfast dishes!

Getting kids to eat is always a constant complaint I hear from most mothers. Young adults, as most of us, are most interested in junk food rather than healthy food based on vegetables or lentils.And including fruits in their diet is even more difficult. My daughter, who is now 7 years old, has always been very picky eater. She was only on milk till she was 6 months, then when it was time start weaning, we started including dal and fruits. We tried Nestum Rice, Farex but she didn't like them. Finally we settled supplementing her diet with Cerelac. She was on Cerlac for almost till she was 10 months old.

Its been the same with my twins.We took the twins for monthly checkup which involved vaccines and discussions on their diet. I was more lucky that the doctors were my Dad's colleagues. I felt the difference because friends used to say they were never told on such things. That's when I thought I should record all these informations to help young mothers better. My twins are now 23 months and its been a journey of sorts when it came to their food habit. Luckily they were not so fussy with food, when compared to my daughter. The reasons could be that since she was the only child then, she had almost attentions of five adults. Now with the twins, since we were boggled with so much work, we just about went taking care of them, though the attention was no less, it may not have been so intense as the first and only child gets.

I plan to write about the food habits and how we managed. Suggestions and ideas on those will be most welcome. For now let me kickstart this with a simple topic on making food interesting and exciting for young adults of age group 3-10 years. No matter which age group they belong, if the child knows that the food is prepared specially for him/her, tends to take interest in eating it. I have found this works always atleast with my daughter. Till she was about 3 years, we used to prepare dal specially for her, which she used to eat without fuss. We tried different ways to include vegetables. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not.

When she started going to school, she had to take packed lunches. I literally used to get nightmares, thinking what to pack. So Amma got these mini idli moulds, which was really exciting for my daughter. She used to ask specifically for those idles. I even sent two plates for my SIL kids and was happy to know they were packing these with gusto!

What you see in this post are few of the breakfast items that I make in small size, to make them look more interesting.

Simple Dal powder smeared with ghee over the mini idlis or mini Dosas make it so interesting. I even allow my daughter to make the dosa while I am overseeing it. I don't normally allow her, but am planning to involve her more going forward.

Small Pooris are so much interesting, though it might be hard to roll them out, my daughter proudly says she ate 3-4 pooris.


Trying to give small servings in frequent intervals makes it more easy for the kids, rather than forcing them to eat three full meals. And making it more interesting by doing these and also involving them, makes things easy for us.

Looking forward to your ideas on this topic. Do share with me what you do with your kid's breakfast!