Lentils with Spinach over Rice

When I was a child, I spent many summers in my parents' native country of Sri Lanka, an island nation in the Indian Ocean. I have watched my cousins and family friends feeding babies and noticed that people generally do not buy baby food in Sri Lanka. Instead, babies are offered an array foods like nutritious meat and vegetable curries, spiced mildly, with rice (which is usually started at about one year of life). One common early finger food is rice mixed with lentils or other meats and vegetables and shaped into small sticky balls. These little rice balls can be easily fed to babies by hand or given to babies to feed themselves. (see picture and recipe below for “Rice Balls with Lentils”). Take about a cup of cooked brown rice. Add a teaspoon of the lentil spinach mixture and mix with your hand. Add more lentils by the teaspoon and keep mashing until you can form the mixture into ¾ inch balls. This can make a great school lunch for slightly older kids, too!