Toddler's chicken rice balls

Recently Alicia doesn't seem to like to eat her rice on its own as she used to do in the past. So I decided to mix in a bit of her baked chicken fillet (which she loves) and shape the mixture of rice and chicken into balls. I guess this is the first step towards being less of a purist. :)


I usually marinate the whole batch of chicken fillet when I buy it from the market before storing them in smaller packs to be frozen.


Handling the Chicken Fillet:
Prepare:

• $2 worth of chicken fillet meat: clean and remove any tendons

Marinate the whole batch of chicken fillet with:

• a dash of sesame oil
• a bit of oyster/ abalone sauce or teriyaki marinade
• a bit of chicken marinade
  

Pack into 1 tablespoon portions to be stored in the freezer.

Baking the chicken fillet:

• Place the defrosted chicken fillet on a small piece of aluminium foil.
• Bake at 180degC for 7min.

The chicken fillet will be nice and tender.

Sometimes my Alicia picks up the baked chicken and just munches on it till she finishes the whole piece of chicken, as if it's meant to be eaten that way! :)

Toddler's Chicken Rice Balls

Have with you:

• a piece or two of baked chicken fillet
• a bowl of cooked rice

Lightly mince the baked chicken fillet (fillet's the softest part of the chicken so it mashes really easily between your fingers).

Take a small amount of rice, add in the chicken and shape into a ball or any other shape. I do this for every ball so as to ensure that there's chicken in every rice ball - that's coz I have a picky eater. If you find it too tedious, just mix all the chicken fillet with the rice and shape the rice balls from there. For me, I find it ok because I just take the time after she's just popped a rice ball into her mouth to shape the next ball! :)

The bumbo re-visited

It's been quite awhile since we managed to get Alicia to sit down nicely on her bumbo. Today I brought out the bumbo and told her to sit down and she obediently walked over to me and sat down in her bumbo. Surreal isn't it? :) Well, that's just coz I was holding her pink bowl of snacks and she wanted to eat her wholegrains. So here's Alicia sitting in her bumbo with her blue tray and pink bowl of snacks, watching tv. Just in case you're wondering why I'm not using the original tray, well, she hates the tray because it's too restrictive (she can push away the blue tray when she wants to get up but she can't do that with the original tray!) and I've definitely got a gal who literally, doesn't like to be tied down.

In the past, she used to hate to sit in bumbo. We surmise that it's because she had difficulty getting out of it in the past. Now that she's so adept at climbing out of it, she doesn't view bumbo as a threat to her freedom anymore. In fact, we see her climbing into bumbo to sit down ever so willingly at times even when we didn't ask her to do so!