Beef Soup for Toddlers
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As the weather cools, you can’t help but love a hearty meal like this beef soup for toddlers that grown-ups will love too. Check out these soup recipe ideas for more inspiration.
I’m an expert on feeding picky kids after 26 years of running my home daycare and feeding nearly 100 different kids. Click on the highlighted link for more tips about how I actually get kids to eat healthy food. I know what kids eat and they love soup!
Soup for toddlers
I have a new girl that is really picky so far. She hasn’t tried a lot of these different foods that I serve. So when I served her this, I gave her a lot of strawberries and crackers on the side because she loves both of those. She stuck her little spoon in there and took a piece of that roast. She ate it and said delicious, delicious.
She continued to get spoon fulls of the farro and the beef and point them to her friends and tell them delicious! I found it really funny because I use the word yummy with the kids so for her to say delicious was so cute. She ate around the vegetables, but she’ll get there. She ate every bit of the meat and grains in that bowl.
This is a whole grain for the food program requirements as well as the meat component. In addition, you can count one vegetable in the soup. So all you would have to serve is a side veggie or fruit and a cup of milk. Easy peasy.
You could also use it for leftovers the next day. I love cooking once and eating twice! It’s a great time saver for my busy daycare provider life!
Beef Soup for Toddlers
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 lb beef roast, cubed
- 12 c water
- 2 T coconut oil
- 4 stalks celery, chopped finely
- 1 pkg mushrooms, sliced
- 5 carrots, chopped
- 1 onion, chopped
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp thyme
- 1/2 tsp pepper
- 1 clove garlic
- 1 c dry farro (or barley or rice)
Instructions
- Trim fat from roast and cut into 1/4 inch cubes
- In a soup pot, add coconut oil and heat pan until ripples form in the oil
- Add beef cubes and stir until all sides are browned
- Add carrots, onions, celery, and mushrooms
- Cook and stir about 1 minute
- Add water, salt, pepper, thyme, and garlic
- Bring to a boil, reduce heat to simmer, cover, and cook for about 1 hour
- Add farro and bring back to a boil
- Reduce to simmer, cover, and cook for 25 minutes until farro is tender
- If using another grain, cook as long as instructions indicate
Can I freeze beef soup?
Freezing beef soup works great. This roast and farro soup is very freezer-friendly. Most soups are. You do have to be careful sometimes about freezing potatoes, but everything in this one holds up beautifully.
To serve later, you could set it in the refrigerator the night before and then just dump it in a saucepan and reheat. You could also just microwave it if you froze it in a microwavable container. I like to use mason jars or plastic deli containers to freeze my soup. If you had used a mason jar, you could thaw it in the microwave too.
If you forgot to set it in the fridge, you could set it in the sink for an hour or two so you could remove it from the container and then heat it up in your pan.
This beef soup for toddlers would be great to make in the instant pot. It would cook the beef faster and get your lunch on the table in even less time. Most of the cooking process for this one is set it and come back later, but if you don’t have hours to wait, you can speed it up with pressure.
More soup ideas for kids:
For more soups that are tried and true kid pleasers, even for really picky eaters, check these ideas out:
And for more ideas for feeding picky kids, check these:
