✓ Weaning, how to introduce legumes

Starting at seven and a half months, eight, I began to introduce legumes into Lea's diet.

I started with the lentils, the hulled ones, more digestible for her and quick to prepare for myself. In fact, they are cooked in about ten minutes and do not need to be soaked. Usually I prepare a base of vegetable broth, with carrots or pumpkin and sweet or yellow potatoes, to which I add the lentils towards the end. I do roughly the same with i peas broken.

Later, towards the tenth month, I introduced chickpeas and borlotti and white beans. Always in the dry version: in this case you have to play in advance and soak the legumes for 10-12 hours, before rinsing and cooking them. Usually I prepare a considerable quantity, both for Lea and for us, which I then partially freeze. Combined with other seasonal vegetables.

In fact, in our weekly menu, legumes appear at least twice in the form of baby food, minestrone or soups or meatballs (never try those with chickpeas or lentils accompanied with yogurt sauce? Yummi, yum, yum :-)).

I legumes are to be alternated with meat (here the ideal is not to offer them together, such as stew and peas :-)), in fact they contain a high concentration of proteins with a high biological vegetable content and amino acids, enhanced when combined with cereals. A few examples? Rice and peas, pasta and beans, spelled and chickpeas, barley and snow peas.

In practice today's recipe: risotto with peas.

Piesse: I added some salmon trout that I had already steamed for us, but you can do without it

Ingredients

30 g of split peas
vegetable broth based on carrots, pumpkin and potatoes
40 g of baby rice
1 teaspoon of extra virgin olive oil
(20 g steamed salmon trout)

Method

Cook the peas, rinsed, in the vegetable broth for about 15 minutes. When they are ready, add the baby rice and cook (about 2-3 minutes). Stir in a teaspoon of oil and serve with a few pieces of trout.

Read all the episodes of the weaning agenda

The author of the article and the photographer

Miralda Colombo is a journalist and author of the blog www.ilcucchiainodialice.com, born on the occasion of the weaning of her daughter Alice and from which the recipe book for children "The spoon", ed. Gallucci.

In recent months the weaning adventure with the second child Lea has started again and has agreed to accompany the mothers of mymodernparents.com with practical advice, tricks and indications from the most accredited scientific societies on baby feeding.

The photos are from Cevì (Cecilia Viganò), artist, photographer and illustrator graduated from the Brera Academy.