How To Make A Salad For Toddlers
If you were curious enough to click on, humor us just one more time with this thought: salad isn’t a bunch of green and healthy stuff; it’s when we put fun and crunchy things together in one bowl.
That’s what we’re trying to tell our toddler, anyway. Salads are a chance to mix and match things a kid knows and loves—Fruit! Creamy dressings! Cracker-y things!—with other foods with which they’re, uh, still cultivating a relationship. Salad, then, isn’t a vegetable; it’s a bright and colorful eating activity. Salads are/as fun.
To wit: this light and summery mix that, unsurprisingly, leans hard on fruits to ease and entice children into new tastes and forms of food. Berries are universally known and loved; your kiddo may already indulge in a cherry tomato or two when they’re extra sweet. Radishes provide crunch–the vegetable your kid doesn’t know is there. The dressing’s soft veil adds an accessible sharpness: new flavors in familiar form. This one isn’t just easy; it’s an entryway into all sorts of options–salad and otherwise–that are more complex and vegetal.
- 1 Orange
- 2 Radishes
- 6 Cherry or Grape Tomatoes (You can use larger tomatoes, too; see note in instructions)
- 8 Raspberries and/or Blackberries (feel free to use more than 8!)
- 1 tsp Fish Sauce (can substitute soy if you don’t have fish sauce)
- 1 tsp Rice Vinegar
- Honey (optional)
- Orange: Peel skin, then pull or slice off fuzzy outsides and/or inside piths if your child is bothered by them. Slice into small chunks.
- Radish: if you have a mandoline, use it to create thin slices. If not, and if cutting by hand with a knife, make matchstick cuts by cutting thin slices vertically and then horizontally.
- Tomatoes: if using cherry, grape, or other small tomato, slice each in half; if using a larger tomato (i.e., beefsteak, roma), we recommend not only cutting them into smaller pieces but cutting them in a particular shape (i.e., a circle or square).
- Toss the orange, radish, and tomato slices in a bowl, along with the berries.
In a separate small bowl, add 3 tablespoons of hot water, fish sauce (or soy), rice vinegar, and as much honey as you’re comfortable with. Drizzle in a bit of olive oil and mix until combined.
Drizzle about half the dressing into the bowl with the orange-radish-tomato-berry mixture, gently mixing to coat contents. Allow to sit 10-30 minutes before serving; spoon additional dressing over salad if needed.
Put a minute into designing the plate so that it is eye catching and appealing to your child. We used a “rings” approach in our photo, creating levels/layers of each individual ingredient; you can also do horizontal or vertical rows of each, or even do an ‘on-off’ sequence so that items appear together. Allow your child to use his/her hands to eat the salad: besides being rather difficult to fork, there is great fun in picking and choose pieces--it may even entice your child to try a new item or two!
Think of this one as a template with easy modifications: grapefruit pieces can fill in for orange, jicama or water chestnuts for radishes, peppers for tomatoes, etc etc. The key here is to maintain a balance of sweet, crunchy, and tangy/tart–so far as you keep it varied taste- and texture-wise, anything goes.
Brad (the Dad) is the founder and Chief Recipe Officer of New Dad's Kitchen. His own cooking/feeding journey started humbly during his son's infancy, preparing and managing his son's bottle intake in order to support his wife; it has since blossomed into a full-on passion to feed his child and family delicious and healthy meals that can satisfy both a toddler and his very tired parents.
