Travel food ideas for Indian kids

This post is for travel food ideas for babies and toddlers, Indian kids from 1y – 3yrs or older. If you are looking for Travel food ideas for younger infants, check out this one.

As expected this age group is much easier than the younger one, for one simple reason – they can consume a wide variety of food now and hopefully have a functional set of teeth too.

1. Carry dates, fruits and nuts (extremely nutritious and fills the protein requirement). This makes the top of my list of travel food ideas for toddlers Indian.

2. Dry Indian snacks like bhakarwadi, mathri, khakhra, chakli and Theplas. Theplas especially are filling and combined with yogurt can be a complete meal too. One of my default option in travel food ideas for babies and toddlers.

3. Makhana and Murmura (puffed rice) – again very nutritious and almost weightless. My children totally enjoy both these as mid meal snacks. With makhana, I always dry roast it in the oven or the pan or add some ghee along with salt and black pepper. Its totally upto what goes better with your kids. When looking for travel food ideas for Indian kids, a lot of parents don’t think of these at all. Another related one would be nuts. Just pack a big box full of mixed nuts, especially if you’re headed to a cold/ winter destination. These are another one of my favourite travel food ideas for toddlers Indian.

4. Goldfish (graham cracker dough based) – if your children have tried it before, it’s a good keep. By now I could even find variations like rainbow fish which comes in more colors than just orange. Its a savior in a lot of situations, like when we went to Bali. This makes for another one of great travel food ideas for babies and toddlers alike, if they have had it before.

5. If the children are fond of jam or Nutella, you can carry a small pack of the same. Buy bread wherever you are, spread one of these and we have a full tummy. If you are a vegetarian family, then this one along with tomato cucumber sandwiches is one of the easiest travel food ideas for Indian kids. You don’t need to carry practically anything but one supermarket or grocery store visit at your travel destination should be enough to keep you well stocked.

6. Ready to eat meals (Madras lentils, rice, paneer etc) – though I am not a big supporter of these, dire circumstances demand desperate measures. This could be one of them and an important one in the list of travel food ideas for toddlers Indian. Considering now Indian restaurants dot the whole travel landscape, this shouldn’t be necessary. But these could come in handy not just if you don’t find an Indian restaurant, but also if the kids are too tired to step out. Till she was almost 4yrs, my elder one would eat nothing but Dal Rice and naan paneer. So finding an Indian restaurant wherever we went or staying with family and friends had become a bit of a necessity. Well, we picked our destinations accordingly too.
Check out this post on choosing appropriate travel destination.

7. Cookies (carry the ones your children like). These are again least preferred but sometimes when you’re in beach locations or other areas which don’t have markets nearby, these could help kids from being edgy. If you’re not picking it up at your home location, just pick some up at the destination.

8. Fruits: We prefer picking up a ton of fruits from neighbouring super markets wherever we go, especially locations within Europe where we’re sure of finding good fruits and eating healthy becomes a bit of a challenge with vegetarians.

My children largely were restricted to Indian home-made food for the formative years (read first 2-4yrs) of their life and thus we had to look for Indian restaurants wherever we went. My daughter now tries other food too (especially pizza, pasta, lebanese and thai) and so we make sure the restaurants we choose for our meals are one of these cuisines.

For this age group I largely depend on the restaurant food for meals and carry with me loads of healthy mid meal snacks.

Need help with planning your visit to Dubai. Feel free to reach me on theglobetrotmom@gmail.com and you can expect a reply within 24hrs.