Trying to get your children to eat vegetables and healthy foods can be demanding. Here are some ideas to tempt fussy eaters.
Your child’s health plays an important part when you are a parent or care-giver of any kind. To see your young one in bed sick is no fun for either of you. Eating a variety of foods and exercise are a good way to help keep your child fit and healthy.
To get the children involved with the food planning and cooking is very important. It is good to teach the child how to cook and plan food to eat for them to be independent. To know the skills of how to cook food is important in case you cannot be there in the kitchen all the time.
A good friend of mine which is an assistant chef is helping me write this article. She suggested some of these ideas which I am sure you will find very helpful.
There is the old saying that an apple a day keeps the doctor away. What do you do when your child flatly refuses to eat some form of fresh fruit? You can use your imagination and make up inventive dishes for treats – such as faces on plates made of fruit. You can use any kind of fruit to make a clowns face – with ice cream or yoghurt as the head.
Vegetables – can be another trying thing to get the children to eat. If they have a bit of a sweet tooth and don’t like carrots add some honey to the carrots for honeyed carrots. Greens are another common dislike, “I’m not eating brocholli,” or asparagus or beans. Ok an idea is to mix them in with a bunch of other vegetables such as your carrots, corn and suggest by mixing them together you can not taste them so much.
Children will always try to find a way of not eating their vegetables, if you can make it fun and inventive it’s often less of a war at dinner. Another idea is to suggest, not tell them, that by eating what they dislike the most first, it saves what they most like for last. It’s like fruit, icecream and jelly, eat the fruit first, followed by the jelly saving the icecream for last.
Meat – is great as you can cook it so many ways. You can fry, boil, stew, bar-be-que, use different seasonings etc. There is always a way of cooking meat and getting your child to eat it even if they complain “but mum I hate meat!”. You can make heaps of dishes out of plain old mince – spaghetti bolognaise, meat pies, sausage rolls, meat balls, hamburger patties, savoury mince.
Some other ideas for quick and easy cooking include:
- Grilled cheese on toast toasted sandwiches
- Toast, rice
- Pasta
- Carrots
- Celery
- Cheese sticks
- Cookies come in a variety of flavours
- Home made bread
- Milkshakes – you can use a lot of flavour
- Fruit platter – arrange the fruit without its skin so that it looks colorful
- Jelly
- Home-made hot chips
- Cheesecake
- Custard yoghurt
- Yoghurt
- Ice-cream and banana’s
- Meat
- Cheese and salad
- Mayonnaise
In addition to meeting nutrition requirements, children also need to exercise on a regular basis. Fresh air and physical activity keep the body fit and the mind active. Ensuring that your kids have an active life style will also get your kids to think more about what type of foods they are consuming. Fitness will become more of a priority if they are very involved in sports.
The main idea is to eat a variety of good foods and allow for junk food less often. Also have some form of regular exercise to keep the body healthy and fit.
