Healthy Family, Happy Family

by Karen Fischer

  16. Use storytelling. Porridge is a big hit in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Goldilocks digs the stuff so much she eats it straight from the bears’ bowls, without asking. Why? Because porridge is yummy and it helps you grow strong.

  17. When you shop for bread at the supermarket with your child, make it a game to search for the bread with magic grains—the grains that can help you concentrate in class and do really great maths. If their grades fail to improve, your disclaimer can be that you bought the wrong bread, and so the fun search can continue (so can the maths tuition).

  18. Do a puppet show and use vegies as props. It’s all about positioning. Give carrots, celery and beans the right publicity and have them show up at all the fun events.

  19. Do a Twilight-inspired fruit bowl. A perfect red apple on the cover of a perfectly popular teen book could be just what your child needs to eat more fruit. Casually mention your Twilight-inspired fruit bowl. Fruit is tempting when it’s associated with the latest fads.

  20. Buy a funky fruit peeler. Apples will never be boring again once you own a fancy apple corer and peeler. There are ones that make the apple unravel like a perfectly cut ‘slinky’ coil. Ask at your local kitchen speciality store.

  21. Make fresh vegie juices. Make a juice out of carrots, celery and parsley and add sweet fruits like apple and pear. Add mint, ginger and lemon and give the concoction a fun name such as Vegie Zinger Juice.

  22. Make Healthy Chicken Burgers and show your child how a really great burger should taste.

  23. Make chicken and vegetable soup and add fun pasta shapes (see Easy Chicken Noodle Soup).

  24. Use cookie cutters. Make your wholegrain sandwiches look fun by cutting out shapes with cookie cutters. Star shaped grainy sandwiches apparently taste better than square ones. You can either leave the cut out bread shape in the sandwich (so there is more sandwich to eat) or remove it and discard the small amount of leftover bread.

  25. If serving grainy bread to a reluctant child, why not try cutting off the crusts. They often taste dry and can make a healthy sandwich less appealing. Don’t worry, they’re not missing out on any nutrients. After your child becomes familiar with eating wholegrains, try leaving the crusts on. Last month my daughter asked me to leave the crusts on. Her friends eat the whole sandwich so now she wants to. I praised her for being so grown up.

  26. Consider the weather. Vegie-rich soups are great during cold spells and salads are ideal for the warmer months.

  27. Encourage your child to talk to their tummy. Tell them: ‘Listen to that full feeling in your tummy and stop eating when you feel satisfied.’ This encourages healthy eating patterns and may reduce their risk of overeating during adulthood. Toddlers and young children enjoy actually talking to their tummies: ‘Belly are you full yet?’

  28. Swap acidic salad dressings such as balsamic vinegar and the usual store bought salad dressings which are full of sugar, for healthy, alkalising dressings made with equal parts apple cider vinegar, olive oil and honey. They’re great for the skin and they make salad more enjoyable for children. (See Tasty Salad Dressing recipe and Quick Salad Dressing.)

  29. Let’s cook

  Let your child help you cook. Show your child how to cook. Let them break the eggs, wash the salad ingredients, peel the mushrooms and make a mess with mince. They’re more likely to eat it if they have helped create it. A fun and simple recipe to try with your child is Ants on a Log. Peel celery sticks to remove the strings thoroughly. Then fill with light cream cheese or hummus dip and dot with a row of sultana ‘ants’.

  30. Try different cooking methods. Do you boil the vegies to oblivion or nuke them in the microwave and then wonder why your family turn up their noses at vegetables? It might be time to experiment with new cooking methods.

  Firstly, observe your child’s taste preferences. Some children like mushy, well-cooked vegetables while others prefer raw vegies cut into dipping sticks, served with a dip such as hummus. Steaming vegetables is a popular method as they are moist but still crisp. Ideally you should steam vegies just long enough to partially soften them; this way, they retain much of their nutrients. If foods such as green beans and broccoli become dull green you know you’ve overcooked them (keep in mind, you child might like them well done).

  31. Become a food stylist. You don’t need to style your child’s meal into a visual masterpiece. Something simple like making a face on their grainy toast with sliced banana or cutting the cucumber into fun shapes and whittling celery sticks into shaped ‘spoons’ can make even the most surly toddler smile.

  32. Bake healthy muffins and don’t give them to your child. Have you noticed? Kids always seem to want what they can’t have. Make a batch of healthy muffins and store them in a clear container or netted basket, placed on the table. Then have one with a cuppa and make some ‘mmm’ noises. Do not offer any to your child. If your child asks for one, say, ‘These are very special muffins for the adults. If you’re lucky, I’ll save one for your lunch box tomorrow.’ If they whine and insist, get them to do a really easy task (such as putting away a toy) and then they can have one of the very special muffins. (Try Strawberry and Honey Muffins or Pear Muffins.)

  33. You can also use such reverse psychology if you notice your child is growing stronger (if they’re getting rough with siblings or harder to wrestle with) to reinforce healthy eating. For example, say ‘Hey, you’re getting too strong, I’ll have to eat more vegies than you tonight!’ If your child beats you at a board game you could say: ‘Have you been eating brainy grains? I’ll have to ask Mum to serve more to me than you tonight!’

  34. Show your child how to chew their food properly. Healthy food can taste bland when it’s first put in your mouth. It needs to be chewed several times before the subtle flavours begin to emerge. Let your child know this—‘With healthy food, the more you chew, the yummier it gets.’ If your child is a toddler show them exaggerated chewing motions and tell them to chew.

  35. Smile more often. A smile implies ‘I like you; you make me happy,’ and it is one of the principles for success taught by Dale Carnegie, author of How to Win Friends and Influence People. A smile can help to persuade your child to eat the meal you’ve just served and it can diffuse a tense situation if your child does not want to eat their dinner. If your child complains about their meal, smile and say something like ‘I’ve popped vegies on your plate because I love you and they help you play and have fun.’ Say it with a smile and it won’t seem like an unpleasant order, ripe for rejection.

  36. Fun with fruit

  Write on it. Oranges, mandarins, bananas and any other fruits with a removable skin can make fun canvases. Write ‘Eat me’ or ‘I’m fresh today’ or ‘Don’t fight over me because I’m gorgeous’. I once wrote ‘Mum’s special orange, don’t touch’ and it was gone within a minute. Guess who didn’t get to eat it?

  Slap a sticker on it. Vegies and apples seem more fun if they’re branded with stickers sporting your child’s favourite cartoon characters. Pop a Shrek apple into your child’s lunch box and see if it gets eaten this time.

  37. Copy cat lunch boxes. Before you drastically change your child’s lunch box contents and start filling it with carrots and hummus, speak to the parents of your child’s closest school friends. Ask these parents if they would be interested in packing similar foods in their child’s lunch box to make compliance greater for everyone. My daughter used to complain about her lunch box items; she’d say, ‘Mum, don’t pack me the tuna pack, none of my friends at school eat them. But you can pack me a carrot because Ingrid has them in her lunch box too.’ I spoke to my child about being an individual and a leader instead of needing to be the same. She rolled her eyes and said, ‘Mum, I just want to fit in.’

  Help your child fit in by talking to the other parents to see if they can make simple lunch box changes. These may include popping in peeled carrot sticks or having ‘Tuna
Tuesday’ and only packing grainy bread sandwiches. Ask the other parents for their suggestions and be sensitive to the fact that some parents may be time poor. Gradually make your child’s lunch box a healthy one and chat with other parents about copy cat lunch boxes.

  38. Marinate it. If your child is reluctant to eat chicken, lamb, fish or tofu, soak it in a tasty marinade before cooking it, between fifteen to 60 minutes for fish and in between 30 minutes and two hours for meats (overnight for special occasions). (Try Marinated Chicken Legs with Crispy Roast Potatoes).

  39. Sing it, don’t say it. Each day my toddler opens our second pantry and empties the items onto the kitchen floor. This keeps him amused while I whip up dinner or a batch of muffins so I keep the lock off the cupboard door while I am nearby. He rolls the tins of diced tomatoes and corn across the tiles, the coconut milk ends up in the hallway and I find the canned tuna underneath the oven. My kitchen ends up looking like an earthquake aftermath every single day. I admit, it gets a little tiring cleaning it up time after time. The solution? We now have the Pack-away Song: ‘We like to pack away our things, so the place is nice and clean, we pack away (we pack away), for another day (for another day)...’ And he helps me place the packaged items onto the shelves.

  You can make up a song to inspire your child to eat up. Maybe something like this: ‘We like to eat up all our greens, so our muscles can be seen; we eat our greens (we eat our greens), our spinach and our beans (and don’t forget our beans). Maybe your songwriting skills are a tad better than my sad attempt at weaving Wiggle magic. That reminds me ... Hot potato, hot potato.

  40. Read this book regularly

  You will be amazed at how effective healthy marketing is and you will be even more surprised at how quickly you’ll forget this information. So I highly recommend reading this section of the book regularly. Your whole family will benefit from the light-hearted fun you bring into your home when you use healthy marketing, so it is worth re-reading this book to find new, creative ideas.

  Of course, life is not all fun and games: you will have to continue being the grown-up who dishes out suitable punishments when your child misbehaves. You will have to make new rules when required. You will need to organise your family so you can all leave the house on time for school or work. You’ll no doubt cook and clean and tell your child to do chores and help out. But in amongst all the busyness, remember to talk to your child about the fun stuff in their life at least once a day. Then link their goals to eating vegies, fish, wholegrains, fruit and all things healthy. Once you have finished reading this book, read it again for new inspirations.

  4

  How to make healthy cooking happen

  It’s time to cook dinner but your two-year-old is clinging to your leg like a koala in a grass fire. ‘Let’s go swimming,’ they cry as you grab the frozen peas from the freezer. ‘I’m boooored, Mummy,’ they wail as you cut open the packet of pasta. They block your path to the stove and say ‘Play with me now!’ Kids just don’t understand the concept of cooking or the necessity of you being in the kitchen each evening. They think ‘fun’ is on the menu and now is the time to have it. And they’re probably right.

  But being an adult, you know that you cannot survive on fun alone, you need to eat too, at least three times a day, which can be quite time consuming if you don’t get savvy. However, what if you arrived home after work and half of tonight’s dinner was already prepared? Or the shopping was done and you knew you could whip up a healthy meal without your child clawing at your left leg? Well you can. Here are six time-saving tips that will help make healthy cooking happen:

  1. Be shopping savvy

  ‘How do I get organised so I know what to cook and when?’

  If you stand in front of the fridge for just two minutes, three times a day while figuring out what to cook for the family, you’re wasting 36.5 hours every year. And if you also make two trips to the shops each week instead of one, you squander approximately 39 hours each year. Now if you live to 65 that’s more than five months of your adult life wasted on unorganised food preparation!

  And it could be costing you a bundle at the checkout. Have you noticed how often you throw out wasted food? The packets of out-of-date flour in the back of your pantry and the rotting vegies in the bottom of your fridge? And did you lose inspiration to use the final three-quarters of that bunch of silver beet or did you plan to leave it festering on the middle shelf?

  The solution? Be shopping savvy. Have a weekly meal plan and stick to it and you will save cash and time. Just a couple of minutes planning and one trip to the grocery store each week makes you shopping savvy and it is the key to restoring balance to your life.

  You can be shopping savvy by following the weekly menus in Chapter 7 and using the corresponding shopping lists starting (which can be printed out online for extra convenience). Try them—you’ll never have to stress about meal planning again.

  2. Become a p.m. planner

  ‘I don’t have much time in the morning so how do I prepare my child’s lunch box quickly?’

  For a smooth and struggle-free morning, do some p.m. planning and prepare some lunch box items the night before:

  •Pop non-perishable food items straight into the lunch box. Anything that will not go soggy or spoil can go into your child’s lunch box the night before. These include flavoured pre-packaged tuna (the sealed kind that does not need refrigeration to stay fresh); homemade muffins; washed and uncut fruit such as grapes, mandarin, a whole apple or banana.

  • Pack suitable utensils such as a spoon or fork.

  • Perishable lunch box items can be prepared the night before and stored in the refrigerator. Transfer child-sized portions into containers—yoghurt; baked beans; peeled and chopped celery and carrot sticks wrapped in plastic wrap; leftover dinner such as spaghetti bolognaise, casserole or pasta—and keep them fresh in the fridge. See Chapter 8, ‘A healthy lunch box’, for more lunch box suggestions.

  You can also cook larger batches of food when you are preparing dinner so the next meal is quicker to make. Time-saving ideas include:

  • Cook a large batch of rice, instead of enough for only one meal. For example, in Menu 4 the dinner for Day 2 is Lychee Red Curry. Instead of cooking 1 1⁄2 cups of rice, cook 3 cups and freeze the excess in meal-sized portions in plastic zip-lock bags for later use. This won’t take up much room in your freezer and they’ll only take a moment to reheat.

  • Cook enough food for two meals. Many of the dinners in this book are designed for a family of four. However, some of the dishes are double batches so they feed eight, or a smaller family for at least two meals. These dishes include Spaghetti Bolognaise from Menu 1—the frozen leftover bolognaise sauce can be used to make a really delicious Shepherd’s Pie the following week. Or Menu 3 Roast Lamb leftovers can be used to make an amazing Lefty Lamb Casserole with Apricots the following night.

  3. Do some a.m. chopping

  ‘I get home late from work so how do I prepare dinner quickly at night?’

  For a smooth and struggle-free evening, you can do some a.m. chopping. This will save you bundles of time in the evening, when your family is famished. Wake up 15 minutes earlier. Then have a look at the meal you are going to cook in the evening. Then work out if you can prepare part of it now. Suggestions include:

  • wash leafy greens and make part of a salad

  • mix a salad dressing and store it in a jar

  • wash and chop up vegies ready for a stir-fry

  • trim the fat off meat

  • put meat or fish in a marinade

  • make mashed sweet potato.

  These can all be stored in the fridge for later use. Morning preparation (or even early afternoon preparation) is a wonderful way to ensure you have a relaxing evening meal.

  4. Hide the leftovers

  ‘Do I have to cook every single night?’

  Unless you love cooking, having to wash, chop, sauté and serve meals every night ca
n be a pain. That’s why you should prepare extra food, sometimes even double what your family would eat in one meal, then store the leftovers to use at a later date. Do this at least once a week. This can save you bundles of time and take away the temptation to order that greasy pizza from the takeaway shop at the end of your street.

  However, it may be essential to hide the leftovers from your family. If your clan can’t stop at one helping, you need to hide the leftovers so you can have a break from cooking on another night.

  Leftovers are fantastic for next day lunches and snacks. You can also freeze them in small containers, ready for a night when you’re too tired to cook. Suitable leftover dinners that can be frozen include spaghetti bolognaise, casseroles and patties. Meals that can be refrigerated for two days and used for lunches or dinners include most pasta and rice dishes, roast meats and vegetables, certain salads and desserts.

  5. Delegate, delegate, delegate

  If you are the primary care provider you are probably a very busy person. You might make the beds in the morning, prepare breakfast, clean up the mealtime mess, herd the clan into the car, drop the kids off at school, race home (or to work) and do your daily activities and then pick up the kids, go home and serve dinner, clean up and collapse in front of the TV when everyone is in bed.

  When it’s put down on paper this life sounds a bit like modern-day slavery, albeit voluntary, doesn’t it?

  While this may not be your exact scenario at home, it does represent what many primary care providers do on a daily basis. However, you are not part of a family simply to take care of everyone else. You do not have to clean up their mess, take out their garbage, make their beds, organise their lunches and sort their washing once they have passed the age of four (okay, so you may have to wait a little longer but four-year-olds can learn to help in small ways).