These vegetable muffins are a tasty, quick and easy to make snack that my toddler consistently and enthusiastically (key requirements those of you with toddlers will appreciate!!) demolishes. The wife sneaks a few too when I'm not looking! Since it's not everyday you can say your toddler demolishes cauliflower & broccoli, these are definitely worth a go!
Why Vegetable Muffins?
The idea behind these vegetable muffins stemmed from me pulling my hair out trying to get veggies into our princess. Those of you who know me will know how traumatic this was because.....
a) there ain't much hair left to pull out.
b) my daughter was just IMPOSSIBLE to feed solids to.
c) we just moved from NYC to Brisbane at exactly the time we started her on solid food and we had fallen prey to the monster that is....'organic' packet baby food!
Poor Princess and her weaning process got a little side-lined as we visited every rental in Brisbane trying to find somewhere to live. Purchased and took home 3 cars before the one we ended up with. Worst of all traipsed back and forth to IKEA on a near-daily basis, with the wife and I basically living on Swedish pick 'n' mix!
Going Cold Turkey
When the dust settled, we had an addict on our hands and as the stay at home Dad, I embarked upon a cold turkey detox plan and faced the biggest culinary challenge of my life - how to get a picky toddler to eat ANYTHING at all freshly made and also, how to accomplish this without using any salt! I am pretty confident that many reading this are saying "yep, been there & done that"! So to this end, I started off cooking some vegetable fritters for her which she picked at here and there but the main issue with them was I was frying her food, and coupled with the fact the only other veg she ate was mushrooms, I obviously wanted to get some veg into her that wasn't fried - ahhhhhhhhhhhh!
We visited a friend's house for breakfast one morning (hi Leanne!) and she had baked the most delicious bacon cheesy muffins,. Princess ate a handful of them! I figured it would be worth a go to make up my own recipe replacing the cheese with vegetables and see if she fell for it! BINGO!! I've called them vegetable muffins, but the texture is not bread or cake-like in the typical sense of an English or American muffin, but rather more like a more small frittata in texture. Hope that makes sense!
Catering
These turned out so well, and she and my wife loved them so much, that I ended up using them at a catering gig I did - sorry if you are reading this Cath. I promise all my ideas weren't inspired by baby food....... What's really great about these is that the basic recipe can be easily adapted to use different veg so you can sneak other things in too OR if your toddler is like mine, TRY to sneak other things in and generally fail. Although would you believe she once ate 8 of these in one sitting! If that doesn't make you want to try them at least once then I don't know what will.
If you are looking for more inspiration on toddler recipes that adults can eat too check these guys out
3. Hummus
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Happy Cooking and Happy Eating Friends!
Ingredients
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 cup milk
- 3/4 cup grated broccoli approx 4 large florets
- 3/4 cup grated cauliflower approx 4 large florets
- 3 tbsp self raising flour
- 50 g blue cheese *see tip*
- 1/2 garlic clove crushed
- 1 tbsp olive oil
Instructions
- Using the largest side of the box grater, grate the cauliflower & broccoli into a large mixing bowl.
- Add the remaining ingredients and stir well to combine. The mixture will seem a little thick but this is normal.
- Grease the mini muffin tray with the olive oil. Using a piece of kitchen towel to rub in each muffin hole.
- Spoon the mixture into the muffin tray.
- Bake for 14-16 minutes @ 180c.
- Enjoy!
Notes
Essential Tools
- measuring spoon/cups
- box grater
- large mixing bowl
- mini muffin pan
- wooden spoon
Tips/Tricks
- feel free to switch out the blue cheese for regular grated cheese, my daughter & I just happened to really like blue cheese
- this recipe can be adapted to most other vegetables, HOWEVER some vegetables contain a higher water content so you may have to adapt the flour ratio a little. For example, I did corn & zucchini ones where I squeezed the liquid from the grated zucchini and added 2 extra tablespoons of flour
- if you don't have self raising flour you can use plain flour with a little baking powder (substitute 1 tsp flour for 1 tsp baking powder). Personally I find self raising flour yields better results
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