Healthy family cooking

Originally published in the Ketchikan Daily News, January 2015; written by Lisa Pearson.

My New Year’s resolution for 2015 is to incorporate more vegetables into my cooking; or, as my daughter described it to her friends, “Mom is trying to kill us”. Perhaps you, too, are trying to get your family to eat more healthily and you are encountering some resistance. We have some books here at the library that offer different approaches to the problem.

“If you cook it, they will come”. In The Cleaner Plate Club, authors Beth Bader and Ali Benjamin argue that teaching your kids good eating habits begins with you learning them yourself. They advocate cooking from scratch, using fresh ingredients, and replacing junk snacks with whole foods like fruit, vegetables, nuts and cheese. Even if you don’t have kids, their simple recipes are a good way to ease into a more nutritional diet for yourself. Bader and Benjamin also advise that parents take a non-confrontational approach, especially with vegetables. Johnny doesn’t like boiled turnips? Try them roasted. Let Mary dunk raw vegetable sticks into homemade dip (vegetables don’t always have to be cooked). Most of all, keep meals an enjoyable family time, and that will encourage kids to be more adventuresome.

“If they cook it, they will eat it”. In Appetite for Life, dietician Stacey Antine feels that getting kids more involved with the process of creating meals will make them more likely to eat those meals. Take the kids shopping, and ask them to help select the fruits and vegetables. Have them help plant a vegetable garden (even if it’s just a box of herbs on the windowsill). Let them select unusual menu choices, like yogurt sundaes, veggie pancakes and pasta salads. Most importantly, let them help cook. Each recipe in her book includes not only the nutritional information, but also indicates which tasks can be done by the children. In addition to this title, the Children’s library has many cookbooks written specifically for little chefs.

“Make eating a game”. In The 52 New Foods Challenge, author Jennifer Tyler Lee has devised a list of 52 seasonal foods and 150 recipes that will encourage your family to try new things. Some of the foods may be a hard sell with kids - i.e. portobello mushrooms, kale and romanesco (which is a hybrid of 2 perennial kids’ favorites: broccoli and cauliflower). But other foods on the list include plums, salmon and basil. Each food is worth points, with more points being awarded for more unusual foods. Points can also be accumulated for milk, grains, and a variety of colors on the plate. If your children like competition, this is a good way to get them to be more open to new menus.

“Sneak it past them”. In Deceptively Delicious, celebrity spouse Jessica Seinfeld takes the path of least resistance when it comes to getting vegetables into her kids: she purees them and sneaks them into regular dishes. Kids will not notice the cauliflower and sweet potato puree in the lasagna, or the ground mushrooms in the chili, or spinach puree in the blueberry oatmeal bars. I’ve played around with a few different vegetables, and this technique is also a good way to beef up the flavor of any soup or sauce. This is a make-ahead process, where you fill up about 2-3 ice cube trays full of puree and keep the frozen cubes handy for a couple of weeks, so it doesn’t take up much time. However, Seinfeld’s technique doesn’t teach your kids to eat a healthy, balanced diet, either. I think of this as a last-ditch effort to get nutrients into your children, but if you are trying to keep your dinner table from becoming a combat zone, this is one way to do it.

Taken together, the basic plan these books present for raising kids on a healthy diet is this: get them involved, be flexible, have fun and take the time to cook from scratch. It may be hard at first, but after a little while it will all come naturally. (Or at least, that’s what I tell my daughter).