Healthy Eating Starts At Home

The small, mundane things in life often have the biggest impact on a person's health and happiness — and that starts in childhood. Few things demonstrate this concept better than family meals. There is a lot of power in family meals!

 

The family meal can be a simple yet crucially important daily event in which family members bond, discuss the things that are most important to them, and in which kids learn about their cultural heritage. After all, there are very real messages in both what you eat and how you eat it.

There's one catch though. OK, a couple. Don't eat in front of the TV. (And by that, yes, we do specifically mean with the TV on.) Doing that inhibits that good old communication we just mentioned. And don't eat take-outs, because they aren't healthy most of the time. Healthy eating starts at home, in the family — with balanced meals cooked from scratch. Balanced and healthy family meals don't have to take a lot of time to prepare, however, and if you have small kids who are picky eaters, they don't have to look healthy either.

I'm a second-generation vegetarian. I've been meat-free since birth, and so have my two kids, which makes them third-generation vegetarians. We're lacto-ovo, which means we enjoy eggs and dairy products on a regular basis. Still, most of our meals are very vegetable heavy. Vegetables are full of vitamins and minerals. They are cheap, and they are easy to prepare.

I have a friend, also with two kids, who doesn't agree. Whenever she comes over for dinner with her little gang, she ends up having a pizza delivered to my house. My staples? Asian vegetable-fried rice, Middle Eastern style falafel, humus (those are both chickpeas), and baba ganoush (that's eggplant), and Mexican-style salads with home-made tortillas, salsa (that's tomatoes) and guacamole (that's avocados).

“Sorry,” she'll say as she phones the pizza place, which she has on speed dial on her cell phone.

I have to say I was a little judgemental. And then, my younger kid — who used to scoop hot, and I mean hot Korean pepper paste right out of the jar and eat it — developed a vegetable phobia. What kind of mother has to hide vegetables in her kids' meals? This question crossed my mind more than once. Plenty of moms, it turns out. Vegetable phobias can happen, even if you raised your kids on those “healthy-looking foods” my friend commented so crossly about so many times.

A life-long habit of eating healthy meals starts in childhood, at the family dinner table. But you may have to be flexible about what those meals look like. So, I've put together some tips. These are healthy foods that even my friend's pizza-loving kids enjoy, and that my veggie-phobic four-year old doesn't complain about.

Healthy Meals Kids Can't Say No To

 

“I Love You” Salad

Kids are notorious for avoiding salads. I don't know if that reputation is warranted, statistically speaking — but that is completely irrelevant if your kid refuses to try that raw goodness. My kids love salads (even the veggie phobic one, funnily enough), but like it even better if I make “I love you” salad. That basically involves cutting a lot of salad veggies into heart shapes.

How? Start with a base of different kinds of lettuce, and add rocket if you like. Peel some carrots and cucumbers, and make a triangle-shaped incision in the top. Then, get one of those little potato peelers to round the triangle out, and you have a little heart. Proceed to chop them into pieces, and you have lots of little hearts.

 

You can do the same thing to boiled eggs, by squashing an peeled boiled egg into a square (like a small Tupperware container) for a while, and pushing into the top with a barbecue skewer. Again, slice the egg, and you'll have hearts. Cheese can be cut into “kisses” — X and O shapes — with shaped cookie cutters.

Hint: This one doesn't work on teenagers or tweens. The hearts will probably make them throw up.

Veggie Soup

One friend recently told me about a kid who hates broccoli, but loves broccoli soup. Cream soups don't give away their original contents to unsuspecting little vegetable avoiders. Broccoli is a very healthy example, but you can easily do the same with carrot, mushroom, pumpkin, pea, tomato and onion soups. Make sure your kid doesn't watch while you prepare the soup, because they'll refuse to eat the treat they previously loved if they find out what is in there. If your kids are anything like mine, they'll even retroactively claim to have hated the soup they gulped up happily the entire time.

Egg Salad + Veggies

My kids love egg salad with (home-made) mayonnaise. They'll still gladly eat it if I chop spring onions up, grate carrots, and add parsley. Water cress, which kids can grow themselves, is a favorite addition to egg salad in the UK, and a combination that does very well in sandwiches. If you are already making an egg and cress sandwich, it may be easier to also add sliced tomatoes, and even grilled veggies. Zucchini, eggplant and onions are all great for grilling, as well.

Healthy Pizza

What kid doesn't like pizza? You may like to try to exploit the love of pizza by using large portobello mushrooms as pizza bottoms, and adding your obligatory tomato sauce, onions and cheese on top. If you use cheese royally, it may even take a while for a young child to understand the bottom is made out of mushroom. Does that not work? No worries. Just use wholegrain flower instead, or add plenty of veggies on top. Getting your kids involved in the manufacturing process is guaranteed to offer success, because they'll want to eat what they've made.

Pasta

Pasta may not be the healthiest thing to eat on a daily basis, but it contains lots of carbohydrates — the body's main source of energy. Pasta has two other redeeming qualities. Most kids are very happy to eat pasta, and it can be dressed up with all kinds of vegetables. One favorite in our house is paste with stir-fried carrots, broccoli, sundried tomatoes, and a decent amount of cream cheese. On top, we grate parmezan and.... very dark chocolate! It's hard for most children to refuse to eat something that contains chocolate, and I have to say that this dish is amazingly tasty.

Muffins

Home-made muffins can be a great breakfast solution that you can have ready in about 20 minutes. Take any basic savory muffin recipe, and add stuff like sundried tomatoes, grated carrots, zucchini, onions, nuts and raisins, garlic... anything you want, really. Your kids will probably be really happy to get muffins for breakfast and won't notice the vegetables.