Healthy on-the-go snack food
My daughter is 13 (almost 14) months now. We are out and about usually 3-4 hours a day and she still nurses a lot, but I'd like to start bringing snacks for her.
I want some ideas for healthy, whole-food snacks that don't make much mess. The other kids in her play group bring lots of little snack foods that are full of ingredients that I don't want her eating (white flour, sweeteners, salt), at least not yet. But she really seems to want to nibble on the things that they have, and I really like that they aren't very messy and very easy to transport. When I bring things like banana or even cut up apple, frozen peas....well, there is just a huge mess. I'm fine cleaning it up at home, but that kind of mess I've found just isn't practical when we are at other people's homes, in the car, or even on the playground.
Ideas? I guess I'm willing to go for some kind of prepackaged food for this purpose if it doesn't have white flour or sweeteners or (too much) salt (is there any such product? even at the health food store most of the munchies for kids have these ingredients). I know salt is a hard one - I just really want her to know and appreciate what real foods taste like before I start dumping salt onto them. I think salt is probably going to be my first compromise food-wise.
The other thing to keep in mind is she still isn't a good chewer or swallower, although she is slowly getting better at these things.
I used fruit and organic cereal. If there is something as convienent and mess free as that process junk most people feed their kids, I never found it. Maybe make your own snack cracker or maybe even small kale chips. I understand about the mess. I'd just have to remind myself all the time how terrible those snacks are that my frields fed their kids. I think it is Gerber that makes those little freeze dried fruit peices. Anyway, they are made of only fruit and at least use to come in organic varieties as well. Those might fit the bill. My daughter loved them. There are kind of costly though. She'd eat the whole bag in 1 or 2 sittings. The freeze-dried Just ______ that is avalable at the HFS unfortunately isn't the same. The Gerber ones disolve as soon as they hit you mouth. Good luck to you.