Happy Monday?
Does it depend on the weekend you’ve just had, or the week ahead of you? Are you thinking what to make for dinner, or are you young enough not to give it a thought, with all your meals provided by someone else?
Either way, why not take a little time to play? These are meringues, bananas, medjoul dates and crackers filled with cream or mascarpone - the most delicious Italian cream cheese.
You don’t need a child to do it with you, but it helps! For more ideas on kitchen games and experiments, click on the picture.
Play with your food
Antonio Carluccio has begun a war on British restaurants and pubs, telling them to stop serving children’s menus. He is convinced that offering a selection of chips, fish fingers and chicken nuggets is contributing to making children fat. More important, by providing them with separate (mostly fried) foods, it is establishing the idea that children can’t be expected to enjoy the same foods as adults. In his own restaurants there is no separate ‘children’s menu’ - just smaller portions.
Of course if you offer a child a bowl of radishes, olives and a drink of Campari they’d prefer to eat some crisps. But if everyone sits down to the same food and there is enough choice children will get to love some unexpected things.
I played a game with a non-eating grandchild, inviting him to ‘rate’ a dozen foods I’d put on the table for supper with his cousins. Picking up his pencil and paper, he happily tried many things he’d never have considered at home, and after tasting peppers, mushroom soup and fried courgettes, chose a ‘rating’ and admitted he might even try them again.
The other way to get children away from the standard food they expect is to let them play. The beetroot in the picture is the result of a little ‘playtime’ with cooked beetroot and plain yogurt. The child who helped me do this ended up admitting it tasted sweet and ‘quite nice’.
Click on the picture if you want more ideas.
Playtime
A food company called Junior’s Pantry has done a survey where they asked parents what they would do, if they had an extra half hour a day to spend with their children.
The results are:
55% would do something outdoors
39% would play a board game
14% would read a story
4% would watch TV with their children.
In another part of the survey parents were asked what took up most of their time. Not surprisingly most said ‘making meals’. At the bottom of the list was ‘playing with the children’. The company uses this information to promote its ready meals like a Beef Ragu with lots of hidden veggies.
If you follow my thoughts on children and food, you’ll know that I hate the idea of ‘hidden veggies’. Deception is not a good basis for feeding a child. And they’re much too smart to be taken in, anyway.
Children like to make a mess. Why not let them help you make pastry and then play with the left over flour, like in the picture above? They can make their own lunar landscape. That way you can combine what is seen as the boring task of making meals with the activity most parents have least time for: playing with the children.
Persuasion
The trouble with the Government’s Five-a-Day guidelines is that they are now printed on every pack of produce and the message has gone stale. It’s like smokers who read Smoking Kills on each cigarette packet - they know it, but take no notice and keep on lighting up.
So how do you encourage children to eat more fruit and vegetables? Not by cajoling and pushing. I’ve always argued that the aim is not just to make them eat fresh things because they have to but more because they love them. So what better way to start than to play with the food?
The company Innocent produces a range of smoothies and natural juices. They have a brilliant website specially aimed at children which will start to fire their imagination. Click on one of their photos (above) to see what they call Veg Art.
Once they’ve played with the mushrooms and lentils they can begin to cook. Finding a recipe is easy. Google those two ingredients and ‘Martha Stewart’ and it will take you to some cooking that’s simple enough for children to do (with a bit of help) and a result that they’re almost certain to enjoy.
For more ideas go to www.lookitcookit.com - Kitchen Games for Curious Children.
Fish fingers
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.” Albert Einstein
The picture comes from the book Lookit Cookit - Kitchen Games for Curious Children. Showing children how to play with food is the first step in teaching them to value and enjoy it.
Click on the picture to find out more. To find the fish fingers, check on the left of the website and look for Are you brave enough?
Olives
Children in Israel eat olives for breakfast - and at any other time. Black or green olives go particularly well with the huge array of soft cheeses and loaves of crusty bread, covered with sesame seeds.
A raspberry for the future
A small team of volunteers in Cambridge UK has dreamed up the Raspberry Pi - a credit-card sized computer, aimed at children. It costs just £21.60 ($34) and the not-for-profit company that makes them is hoping it will encourage children to learn the basics of programming. Robert Colvile, a journalist for the Daily Telegraph, says ‘even if the children aren’t going to rival Bill Gates with the code they produce, it’s still a good thing for them to have a little bit of an idea about how the world works, rather than just taking for granted that it does.’
Don’t we all want to know how the world works? I’d like to know how the photo was done - click on the picture to see more of the photographer’s work.
A handy cheese idea
Refusing to eat is a powerful tool and one that can be used by the smallest child. Just watch a baby turning his head away when offered a spoonful of something mushy from a jar. A child who rejects what Mummy puts on the table will usually win: most parents will offer something else and even threats like “you’ll get nothing else before you go to bed” will disintegrate when a pleading child comes down at midnight saying he’s hungry.
So what’s the answer? How do you cope with a child who starts a battle every mealtime? The solution is to make them see food as fun. For this you have to get them playing. A girl who hates cheese will see it differently once she’s made it into biscuits that look like hands and feet.
Click on the picture for more ideas: games, experiments and pictures that will delight the most food-resistant child.
Overcoming an allergy
Following research at three universities (London, Cambridge and N. Carolina) it’s now being suggested that the best way to avoid allergic reactions is to expose children to foods like peanuts in infancy.
Until recently parents were told to keep children away from possible allergens till the age of two or three. But Professor Lack of King’s College London did an experiment with Jewish children who live in England and those who live in Israel. The English children were 10 times more likely to have a peanut allergy than the Israelis, who eat far more foods containing peanuts.
The new idea is to feed small doses of peanut flour to allergic children every day for 30 weeks. This will raise their tolerance to the dreaded food and will enable them to eat 32 peanuts with no reaction by the end of the trial.
It’ll be good if it works. Munching roasted peanuts is one of life’s great pleasures.
Young and gifted?
Do you know anyone between the ages of 10-14 who can cook? The Guild of Food Writers is running its annual competition called CookIt. To win the prize (a family holiday in Cornwall) you need to wow the judges with a stunning two-course meal.
Under 18s are invited to show off their writing skills in another competition, WriteIt. For this you should write 750 words on any foody subject - anything that interests, excites or frustrates you. Click on the picture for all the details and entry forms.
Are you cut out for it?
To make these you need:
Recipe for butter biscuits (see jigsaw shapes above)
Cutters - round will do but they’re boring
One child - boy or girl, doesn’t matter
To get some more ideas for what to do on a rainy day with children, click on the picture.
Draw your dinner
A brilliant idea from America: paper place mats which are elegant enough to use for ‘ladies who lunch’ or for any gathering that includes children. The adults can make tasteful designs on the plates - the younger ones can draw and colour what they hope will be for dinner.
Glazed aubergines
Eggplants, as they’re called in the States, are like sponges: they absorb flavours and huge amounts of oil when cooking.
I’ve thought of an idea to avoid the frying and keep in the taste. The slices are painted with a garlicky tomato mixture and baked in the oven. This recipe is perfect for children (though I admit they might not be persuaded to eat them).
Click on the picture and go to Today’s Recipe for the details.
Cracked it!
For some while I’ve been experimenting with molten chocolate puddings: the warm round cakes that have a melting chocolate sauce inside. I’ve tried maybe a dozen recipes and even with careful timing it’s almost impossible to get the inside consistently soft, with the outside just cooked.
Now, by accident, I’ve found the answer: surround the cake with the sauce, instead of the other way round. You make a cake with a creamy filling and a jug of rich chocolate sauce. Keep them both in the fridge till an hour before the meal.
Then to transform these into individual puddings, cut the cool cake into squares and just before serving pour over a generous amount of the hot chocolate sauce.
The result is perfect. As well as being easy, there’s absolutely no last minute baking (or worrying).
To find the How-to, click on the picture and go to Today’s Recipe.
