Eat Up: Food for Children of All Ages

For many parents, problems can arise as soon as their children have their first taste of convenience foods. The simple answer, of course, is to steer well clear of them but nowadays there is such a strong assumption that children should eat special ‘children’s foods’ (despite the fact that these are often packed with sugar and additives) that they can be difficult to resist. Children are frequently offered these foods outside the home anyway and they usually love them.

So gradually ‘child-friendly’ processed, prepacked, flavour-enhanced convenience foods, loaded with additives and preservatives, creep into the fridge. Now there is very little wrong with an occasional meal of fish fingers, boiled potatoes, peas and ketchup but if any food appears too frequently in a child’s diet it is at the expense of another. The child becomes wary of other types of food and getting them to eat a varied diet becomes difficult.

It is so much easier to persuade children to accept new flavours and foods if they are given a wide experience of new textures and tastes in their first year and are never given the option of eating rubbish in the first place. I know it is virtually impossible to keep them away from junk food indefinitely, but in the home at least you can make a rule that there is only good, unprocessed food on offer. If kids are hungry enough they will eat anything, but when they are given the choice between an apple and a packet of sweets, the sweets win every time. The best solution is to offer them a choice between an apple and a banana instead.

The range of foods children are offered is significant. If they are offered only ten different types of food, you can be pretty sure that they will refuse three and moan about two. If they are offered 50 types of food, even if they refuse 25 they are still eating a decent variety and will be getting a better nutritional balance.

Manufacturers have successfully exploited the significant role that packaging plays in determining whether a food product gets into the shopping trolley or not. Yoghurts are an extreme example. Once considered to be healthy, they are now just an extension of the sweetie counter, with lots of sugar, chemical additives, and cartons that feature children’s favourite television characters. Even apples come wrapped in Mister Men packaging. Trying to get around the supermarket with small children is a nightmare if you don’t want to end up with a trolley full of junk. When I am shopping with Ellie and Lydia I usually give them a bag of grapes to chomp on, which lasts until we get past the rubbish through to the fresh bread. Then I get a baguette and they break the ends off and chew on those. On a good day, this plan will get me to the checkout without any whingeing.

Because food plays such an important part in my life, I am probably more pushy than most when it comes to what my children eat but I do realise that there’s no point having unrealistic expectations. Like most children their age, Ellie and Lydia have very strong likes and dislikes, and just because I want them to acquire a taste for a particular food doesn’t mean they will. I never force them to eat anything because it would probably be counterproductive but I do insist that they try something before they tell me they don’t like it. Letting them take charge in the kitchen is a good way of getting them to try foods they might otherwise reject. Neither Ellie nor Lydia used to like eggs very much until I got them to help me make coddled eggs. They stood on chairs to crack the eggs into little pots, then watched them cook in the oven, and were keen to eat them when they were ready. I like to let them help me squeeze fresh orange juice, too, so they see how much mess and effort is involved in producing a small amount. Because there isn’t much they savour it, and when we compare it to the processed taste of orange squash they can see how far removed the real thing is from its commercial cousin.

If there is only a tiny amount of something available it tends to seem much more desirable to them, so serving very small portions of any food that has taken time to prepare is a good tactic. Adults often forget that a small child’s stomach is only the size of their clenched fist, so they can’t eat very big portions. It is better to serve them less and let them ask for more than to load their plate.

When I want Ellie and Lydia to taste something unusual I tend not to offer it to them at mealtimes. Instead I make a distinction between ‘tasting’ and ‘eating’, with tasting as a no-pressure opportunity to explore flavour. Some children enjoy doing a blindfold quiz, where they have to guess what they are eating and say whether they like it. It’s easiest to start with teaspoons of flavoured liquids – anything from elderflower to Marmite. Sometimes we do food comparisons, when, for example, I buy three types of tomato and get the twins to help me choose which one tastes best.

When Ellie and Lydia developed a passion for ‘anything with breadcrumbs’ and started to take an unhealthy interest in junk food, I decided the best way to steer them back on to decent food was to imitate the things they liked but to cook them myself, using good fresh ingredients. Hamburgers make a very nutritious meal if they are prepared from good-quality minced beef. Fishfingers made with fresh cod or haddock fillet and coated in freshly prepared breadcrumbs are a great alternative to the shopbought versions, and even thick-cut chips or potato wedges made at home contain lots of nutrients and less fat than the frozen variety. Although I realise this is hardly pushing the frontiers of flavour, at least Ellie and Lydia now know what real minced beef or fish tastes like. I have also persevered in trying to find ways of including ingredients they don’t like in their diet, so now, though they won’t eat leeks, for example, they love leek and potato soup.

Eating out regularly can help to stimulate children’s interest in food. Many parents are put off by the fear that their children will create an embarrassing noise and mess, but if kids are introduced to eating out early on they soon adapt to the different environment. Though they are only four, I regularly take Ellie and Lydia to Chinatown in London for dim sum or to Brick Lane for Indian food. Ethnic restaurants tend to have a friendlier, less stuffy approach to children, which means that everyone can relax. We order lots of small dishes and, though the girls certainly won’t eat everything, they don’t feel under any pressure so they tend to be more adventurous than usual. Eating ‘tapas style’ allows kids to experience a wide variety of different flavours at the same time and this is not something that can be easily recreated at home.

Another advantage of ethnic restaurants is that children are expected to eat the same food as adults. Going to a restaurant and ordering proper food for yourself and a ‘children’s menu’ of cheap sausages and chips for the kids totally defeats the purpose of taking them to a restaurant in the first place. Separating children’s food from adults’ can only add to the problem if you are trying to educate them to eat properly. For so many small children, dinner is something served in a plastic bowl at 6pm while their parents try and get on with something else. It’s no wonder that they fail to see it as an enjoyable social occasion. It is difficult for many families to eat together during the week because of early bedtimes and long working hours but at least we can try and redress the balance at weekends.

I believe that children do prefer to eat good food but a lot of them just don’t get the opportunity. Providing home-cooked meals for them is one way of making sure that they do. Cooking fresh ingredients is more labour-intensive than relying on convenience food but it is also more nutritious, more satisfying and less expensive (think of the price of a carrot compared to the price of a jar of carrot purée). The long-term gain is that the whole family becomes healthier and more adventurous in its tastes.

The recipes in this book are basically classic dishes or adaptations that I feel would be suitable for adults and children to enjoy together. On the whole they are very simple to make, because there’s no point spending an inordinate amount of time cooking something that your two-year-old might hate. Because children have such different tastes, they won’t like all the recipes, but persevere and they may well surprise you. When we took the kids to the London restaurant, St John, to meet Fergus Henderson, who had cooked up a big plate of pig’s tails, I could never have guessed that Ellie and Lydia would tuck in with such gusto.

I hope this book will encourage parents to make fresh food for their children. Sure, you can go out and buy a bottle of lemonade but making it yourself is easy, infinitely healthier and tastes of what it is supposed to taste of – fresh lemons. That’s really what this book is all about.

Shopping (#ulink_083b6db5-8431-5f86-9987-e8a29b260a62)

Because I love food I actually enjoy shopping, though I am the first to confess that I am not usually pushing a trolley full of nappies and cornflakes. I like to go to Covent Garden market every Tuesday morning at 5am to find out what’s available. Interestingly, I have only ever bumped into one other chef there, though if you believe the press the place should be crawling with them. Many chefs rely on their suppliers to bring new foods to them but I find that wandering around myself keeps me in touch and also gives me fresh ideas about what to cook. If I invite people to dinner, they are often surprised when they ask me what I am cooking and I say that I don’t know because I haven’t been shopping yet. But if I try and plan dishes in advance I often can’t find one of the key ingredients anyway, so I like to keep an open mind. If I find a good main ingredient I can usually match the rest of the meal around it with what’s available. In the same way, I quite often find myself creating dishes with what’s left in my fridge at home. Lots of well-known dishes have been invented in this way – for example, Caesar salad. Who would ever think of matching anchovies, Parmesan, garlic, romaine lettuce and croutons? That’s what Caesar Cardini did when guests turned up at his hotel unexpectedly and he had nothing to feed them.

Though supermarkets nowadays are ahead of the game, unfortunately they are often ahead of the seasons, too. I find it sad that, just as we are all becoming more sophisticated about food, our awareness of the seasons is being destroyed. Supermarkets aim to supply everything all the time, regardless of where it comes from, what the season is, whether it is ripe, and, most important of all, whether it has any flavour. Yes, in theory, it’s great to be able to cook with anything you like all year round, but what’s the point if it doesn’t taste of much? Certain foods are only worth eating in season, such as tomatoes and berries. As a child, I used to look forward to the appearance of my grandfather’s first strawberries in June, but now that we can eat imported ones all year round – greenhouse-grown and tasteless – the magic has gone. So although I envy kids today the huge variety of food they can pick and choose from, at the same time I worry that everything is beginning to taste like everything else – is it any wonder they get bored?

I want to keep alive for my children the tastes and scents of the food that I enjoyed as a child and I believe the best way to do this is to buy seasonally. When it comes to organic food, I have yet to be convinced that it always tastes better. Some organic produce has a superb flavour – chicken, eggs and carrots are obvious examples – but too much of what’s available consists of disappointing and expensive foreign imports. The best way to buy organic is to subscribe to a box scheme, where organic produce is delivered to your door. In this way you can be sure that what you’re getting is fresh and locally produced, and prices will be more reasonable because you are buying direct from the producer. Farmers’ markets can be good sources of organic food, too.

In terms of health, organic food is undoubtedly a better choice for children, since it is grown without the use of pesticides, and animals are raised without routine antibiotics and growth promoters. Although ‘safe’ levels of toxins have been established (but not always adhered to), these are based on adult intake. Children have less body mass and so consume a proportionally higher amount – particularly babies, for whom fruit and vegetables are a major source of nutrition. At the same time, their immature immune systems are less able to cope with toxins in their diet. As a parent I worry about the potential effect on my children’s health of modern farming methods but I’m also concerned about the lack of diversity. Supermarket demands for uniform produce with a long shelf life have resulted in the loss of hundreds of varieties of fruits and vegetables. The quest for cheap meat has led to the loss of traditional breeds and an intensive farming system that has become tainted by disease – even eggs are no longer considered a safe food for our children. Supermarkets now package food with ‘grown for flavour’ on the labels because so much produce tastes of nothing. Surely beyond ‘eating to live’, the whole point of food is flavour, and the best way to achieve this is to go back to more natural farming methods.

Cooking (#ulink_8c5bf041-6ce5-50de-ad13-16932c9a2572)

At school, when it came to the crunch at the end of the fifth form, I was completely clueless about what to do with my life. All my mates became golf pros and if I had been serious enough about it I could have followed them. I had a seven handicap by the time I was 15 and played three times every weekend and as often as I could during the week.

In our last year at school we had to choose between metalwork and domestic science. I couldn’t see the point in filing away at a bit of metal for weeks to end up with a key ring, so I opted for cooking. I was teased a lot, but once I got into making pineapple upside-down cake I started to enjoy it. When I beat all the girls and won the school domestic science prize, the careers officer suggested that I apply to catering college. I never imagined that making that small decision would turn into my big career opportunity but once I got to college I never looked back.

My lecturer at Weymouth College, Laurie Mills, became an inspiration. We hit it off immediately and his passion for food was contagious. He had worked at the Dorchester and Grosvenor House hotels in London, where I was later to follow in his footsteps. His approach was very relaxed and he taught me that cooking for a living was not only great fun but also socially acceptable.

My style of cooking still reflects the things I learned when I was growing up, and it’s a style that works well at home, too. I use the best seasonal ingredients I can find and stick to natural combinations of flavours. Maybe snacking on my friend Mark Hawker’s dad’s queen scallops in the school playground taught me this lesson at an early age. I don’t believe in fussy, complicated techniques or presentation, and the older I get the less I try to create new combinations. The main ingredient should always be good enough to speak for itself. If you find a really great piece of fish, why try and complicate the dish and end up masking its flavour?

When I was training to be a chef we studied classic French cooking because the French seemed to own cuisine in a way that we British never could. French cooking was difficult, intimidating and sophisticated. Cookery books were all the same – everything came with tricky sauces or had to be braised with a hundred different flavourings. We learned the French term for every single ingredient, and even now, when I eat out in France, I can order in immaculate French but I can’t ask for directions to the loo. Though some people still believe that proper cooking involves complicated sauces and pyrotechnics, I find that most of the best dishes I come up with have no more than three complementary main ingredients, and I like to be able to taste all of them.

This doesn’t mean that I always play safe when I’m cooking. I enjoy creating dishes and I’ve got to the stage where I don’t need to worry too much about culinary correctness because, after years as a chef, I have developed a reasonable understanding of what works and what doesn’t. This is the key to good cooking, yet there’s no mystery about it. If you like food and you are keen to learn, you can do the same. Just keep practising and always be open to ideas – magazines, books, television and restaurants are all excellent sources of inspiration and will help you refine your culinary sensibilities.

If you want to cook for your children but lack confidence in the kitchen, remember that preparing food for a small child is a great way of developing an understanding of ingredients and flavour. It’s fascinating to witness small children trying foods for the first time and it can help you to rethink tastes you’ve taken for granted for years – all those simple purées, for example, reveal how sweet many vegetables are and how surprisingly acidic fruit can be.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that flavour is unimportant to small children. Given a choice between boiled vegetables or the significantly more tasty vegetables roasted with herbs and olive oil, most adults would automatically choose the latter – and, not surprisingly, most children would, too. As soon as they are old enough (around eight months) you can begin to add small quantities of flavourings such as herbs, ginger and garlic to their food. If, like me, you prefer to keep things simple when cooking, you will find that flavour is determined largely by the quality of the ingredients you use (unless, of course, you cremate them during cooking). You don’t need to overdo flavours, especially when cooking for children – just trust the ingredients to do their work. Even the subtle flavour of the oil a food is cooked in will add to the taste of the final dish – particularly with Italian food, which is one of the best examples of culinary simplicity and also one of the most appealing cuisines for children.

Nowadays no one needs to cook in order to survive but there’s so much more pleasure to be had from cooking than from choosing a packet out of the chill cabinet of the supermarket. And if your children grow up surrounded by the sights and smells of cooking – a soup simmering on top of the stove, a roast chicken being taken from the oven, fruit being puréed to make a smoothie – they are far more likely to appreciate good food and the effort that goes into making it.

Feeding Babies and Toddlers (#ulink_ef605d44-2e8e-5495-ab72-fb3ea470c3ea)

Weaning Times

The chart below indicates when you can safely introduce foods to your baby’s diet. With the notable exceptions of whole milk, gluten and nuts, from a nutritional point of view most foods are appropriate for children once they have been weaned. It is really a question of texture – if it’s not smooth or small enough for your child to swallow, do not give them it.

From 4 months:

Baby rice

Carrot

Potato

Parsnip

Swede

Courgette

Cauliflower

Green beans

Sweet potato

Banana

Apple

Pear

Papaya

Pumpkin and squash (such as butternut squash)

Broccoli

Tomato

Spinach