Slow and Steady…

Serial dieters wake up on a Monday morning resolved to change all their eating bad habits instantly. Their plans rarely work: lack of planning and trying to do too much too quickly, equates to failure every time. The same can be said of trying to change your Picky Picker’s eating habits. It’s not going to happen overnight! Baby steps are required. Focus slowly on introducing new tastes, whilst gradually cutting down on anything you feel they eat too much of, or shouldn’t be consuming at all. Each new taste will need to be tried many, many times before it’s accepted as regular food, and not as something strange and alien.
There is absolutely no point in putting a plateful of completely unfamiliar food in front of your Picky Picker and expecting them to polish off the lot. They won’t, and it will cause them, and probably you, an awful lot of unnecessary stress.
It can be heartbreaking to have a lovingly prepared meal picked at unenthusiastically, or turned down completely, so try serving a small portion of something new, combined with a larger helping of something familiar. Ask your child to eat at least one proper mouthful of the new food. Hopefully the next time you serve it, they’ll eat more of their own accord and, after a while, you can serve a bigger amount of the new food, and you can move on to the next food you’d like them to enjoy!

Give a Little…

Be prepared to give in a little to your Picky Picker sometimes! When I was little, I’d eat baked beans, but only if they were served in a separate bowl to my other food, and with just the tiniest bit of sauce left on them. This way they couldn’t ‘infect’ my toast! But who cares? The important point is that I ate the beans. My demand caused very little inconvenience, and made me feel I had some control over what went in my body. Now I eat baked beans normally, ‘infecting’ anything they like!
If your child wants some of their food separated, my advice would be to just do it. It’s really not a big deal and it means their food gets eaten. If you’re concerned, and your Picky Picker is insisting upon absolutely everything on their plate being carefully segregated, you could always gradually move non-liquidy foods closer together (even my 7 year old self would doubt that a fish finger could do much to a boiled potato if they dared to touch!).
These funny whims will most probably all be grown out of given time. If not, with a bit of luck their university flatmates will tease them so mercilessly, they’ll give up their fads then!

Time to Digest

Just imagine how you’d feel if you were sitting enjoying your supper, when suddenly someone appeared at your shoulder and started nagging you to ‘Hurry up!’ and ‘Get a move on!’ because you have to ‘leave in two minutes!’

It wouldn’t be very pleasant, and would certainly ruin your meal. Yet this is what many, many parents frequently do to their children at breakfast on school days in particular, but also notably at teatime when they have to hurry out to after school activities.

So, what can be done to make food time less rushed? The most important thing is to leave plenty of time to both cook the food and to allow it to be enjoyed. There’s no point blaming the children if you forgot to put the tea on in time! If you’re running a bit late, it’s better to whip up a sandwich or some scrambled egg on toast than attempt something more and leave them with little time to eat it.

Even if you’re not eating with your children, try to take the time to sit down and chat to them about their day as they eat. Or at least potter around tidying or getting things ready in the same room.

It takes a while for a young child to eat a meal, and there’s no point rushing them! If you really do feel they’re being unnecessarily slow just explain when you need them to have finished by, and that they won’t have time for pudding if they don’t get a wiggle on. Seeing a sibling get their yogurt first can be a big incentive to eat up!
If they’ve had ample time, but still haven’t finished and you really have to leave, just take the plate away and get them ready. Maybe they’re just not hungry, but if they are still peckish, they’ll eat quicker next mealtime!

Late Night Tastings

Allow me to let you into a little secret: nothing encourages a Picky Picker to try a new food more than being told the food is for a special grown-up supper later and it’s time for them to go to bed!

Oh, the excitement of being put to bed and smelling gorgeous foody smells wafting up the stairs, only to have Mummy or Daddy pop their head round your bedroom door ten or fifteen minutes later with the words, ‘The supper we’re having is amazing, would you like to come down and have a taste?’

Would any child stay in their bed given an opportunity like that?

A couple of weeks ago, our two eldest boys came into the kitchen whilst my husband was cooking for the pair of us. They were on their way to bed, but begged to be allowed to try the fresh crab we were having for our starter. They did so, trying four different combinations of the crab with various add-ons to see which they preferred. Half an hour later, they were invited to come down and try our rainbow trout (having first been told in gruesome detail about all the bits that squirted out of it whilst we were filleting – they’re boys, they love that stuff!) with spinach, lentils and pancetta. They loved it all, and had to be shooed away from our plates before they woofed down the lot, yet neither had tried crab, trout, or that particular type of lentil before. What a result!

Help! A Picky Picker’s Coming To Tea!

There’s not much that can instill more dread into the heart of a parent than cooking for someone else’s Picky Picker, especially when you’ve got your own children’s food dislikes and fads to take into account. But what can you do? You can’t not invite your little cherub’s best pal over just because you’ve heard they’ll only eat Coco Pops for their tea.
My advice would be to keep it simple. Don’t try them with anything they’re unlikely to have tried before. This is not the time to attempt to introduce them to the glory of stuffed olives or king prawns, no matter how much your own kids love them.
If you’ve invited over a really notorious Picky Picker it might be worth asking their parents what their child likes to eat. It’s also a good idea to check whether the child has any allergies or special dietary requirements. If you’ve still got no idea what to serve, anything with chips is probably a good bet, and stick to bland flavours if possible.
Logically, if you offer plenty of choice there’s bound to be something they enjoy! Consider setting things out buffet style so they can help themselves to what they fancy. In fact, a ‘party’ tea could be a good plan – some sandwiches, crisps, cocktail sausages, fresh fruit…
For pudding, cupcakes are usually a good bet (just don’t ice them all in case the guest only likes them plain) with some grapes and apple. There can’t be many kids who’d complain about that!
It can be pretty tricky being a Picky Picker, I remember turning down an invitation to stay at my friend’s house for tea, even though I was having a fantastic time, just because my friend’s Mum said she’d cook pizza and I didn’t eat it.
Try not to make too big a deal about the meal, or comment on what they’ve eaten. If your own child comments that their friend is being fussy just explain that, as a guest, their friend can eat whatever they want and then change the subject. A ‘look’ should be enough to make clear that the same rule does not apply to them!
Above all, don’t panic! They’ll probably only be with you for one meal, they won’t starve if they don’t eat much!

Howdy!

If anyone knows about dealing with picky or fussy eaters it’s me! I was one myself, and still am in many ways.

Until about the age of 8, my diet mainly consistedof marmite toast or marmite sandwiches, with the occasional pack of ready salted Hula Hoops, apple, smooth apricot yogurt or McDonalds burger and chips thrown in. When I hit my teens, and finally started enjoying such delicacies as roast chicken and lasagne, I decided to become vegetarian! My poor parents must have despaired!

Now, I eat a varied, interesting diet and absolutely love cooking. I’m no longer vegetarian (the lure of bacon was too strong to resist!), but I am careful about the welfare of the animals I eat, and will only buy free-range or organic meat. An outsider would never believe I still have problems with certain foods (‘slimy’ ones in particular).

When I had my children, I saw fussy eating from a whole new perspective! Part of  one of my children’s autism meant that he was extremely finicky about what he’d eat. He would tolerate pasta with either tomato sauce or pesto, but the only hot food he really enjoyed was a margherita pizza. The child wouldn’t even eat chips! It took a long time, and a lot of hard work, to help him to accept the foods in the far more interesting, and balanced, diet he now enjoys.

With another son we faced further difficulties. He may not have loved everything we put on his plate, but he ate it all and had quite broad tastes for a little chap. However, when he was 5 he became ill and was diagnosed with a form of Irritable Bowel Disease. This meant a complete overhaul of his diet until medication could get his symptoms under control: no raw vegetables, no fruit or vegetable skins, no brown bread, very little dairy, and no chocolate or sweet! Add a nut allergy which he developed at the same time, and a trial with him gluten-free, and it was a bit of a nightmare!

As you can see, I really do know first hand how hard it is to help a child accept a new food, especially when unhealthy habits have already been formed, and how tough it can be to be inventive when certain foods have to be restricted or stopped completely. What I hope to do on this blog is provide a wide variety of recipes, which I hope will appeal to children, and which progressively allow for the introduction of new foods into their diet. Often the methods I suggest will involve introducing a taste very gradually, perhaps by adding more ingredients and flavours into a simple recipe over time (plain mashed potato can have cheddar cheese – first mild, building up to mature – grainy mustard and spring onions added to make what I call ‘grown-up mash’ for example). But most of all, the blog is about having fun with food, getting a bit messy and trying out new tastes and cooking styles to find what appeals to your child.

I hope that my recipes, tips and advice will help you to encourage your child, and maybe even yourself, to try cooking and eating lots of lovely new foods together.

Happy munching!!

p.s. Look out at the bottom of my recipes for printable pdf versions of those I think are particularly fun to make with little hands helping!