Chicken Pancakes: Toddlers and Protein

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Getting enough protein into my daughter’s diet is difficult. She eats plenty of human food (God, I need to stop calling it that!) but she has trouble with protein-rich foods. She likes the flavor of chicken, for instance, but the texture is difficult for her to manage. She can’t chew up chicken enough to be super easy for her to swallow. She also doesn’t like eggs so there goes that.

We haven’t introduced nuts yet. You can see the predicament. But then it hit me! Meatballs!

Matt had cooked up a whole chicken in the crockpot to make a few meals for the week. Thankfully, we had egg and breadcrumbs on hand. So, he cut up some chicken and put it, along with part of a beaten egg and some breadcrumbs, in the food processor. Next thing I know, there’s a disgusting looking chicken paste in the bowl.

He formed the mixture into balls and plopped them in a lightly buttered pan.

Chicken meatball pancake

Chicken pancakes

Okay, so they didn’t really stay in “ball” formation. They kind of collapsed. This was the first impromptu meatball attempt, okay? Cut us some slack! The end result was chicken pancakes that held together surprisingly well. After allowing it to cool, we gave our girl pieces of the pancakes and she gobbled them up quick. And once she got bored, she threw them off the highchair to try to feed the cats. So pretty much everybody in the house was happy after this culinary experiment.