Kids Cuisine

So, you have kids? Let me guess. They are picky eaters. I’m shocked! OK, maybe that isn’t the case for all of you, but odds are pretty good it’s true for most of you. I just know the statistics in my own household — three kids, and two are picky eaters. So I’m going to go with two out of three kids will turn a nose up to anything healthy, anything you’d like them to eat, even anything they used to eat yesterday (today they hate it).

A few years ago, a friend of mine shared a secret to sneaking rejected food into kids’ bellies. She went to a restaurant that was clever enough to offer apple butter as a dip for the children’s meals. I tried it on my daughter then, who just loved to decide today was the day she wouldn’t eat anything. She also loved to reject pretty much all meats and was hit-or-miss on veggies. Eureka! She loved eating anything dipped in apple butter. I don’t think it was just about the taste. It was also just plain fun to dip.

Since then, I’ve experimented with a lot of different healthy food dips for the kids. The great thing I learned from the apple butter advice was that you can think outside the box when it comes to dips for kids. I would probably never dip, say, green beans into honey. Kids will dip foods into strange things and love it. Whatever works, right? You can make dips with yogurt, cottage cheese, hummus (yes, I have a 1 year old who loves hummus), anything that can be pureed. Make a fun kid salsa by throwing together fresh local tomatoes with a mix of fruits.

My oldest child also loves to boycott dinner altogether, no matter what’s on the plate. We do this dance every night:

Me: “Here’s your favorite.”
Her: “I don’t like carrots!”
Me: “You’ve loved carrots since birth!”
Her: “I want something else! I HATE carrots!”

And I’m sure you can guess where it goes from there. But I discovered an interesting tip to getting my oldest daughter (a stubborn age 4) to actually eat dinner. She started helping mom make dinner. She started helping me pick between available dinners to decide what we will eat that night. She sets the table. We each got aprons, and she insists we ceremoniously don them before we cook.

Now she can boast that she made the dinner, and that she set the table. She takes ownership of the meal and is more inclined to actually eat it (yes, even dinners that involve vegetables). I mean, she had to eat dinner eventually, didn’t she?

Photo of vegetables, © Sanja Gjenero.