Mark Hix - Eat Up - Food for Children of All Ages

When Ellie and Lydia developed a passion for ‘anything with breadcrumbs’ and started to take an unhealthy interest in junk food, I decided the best way to steer them back on to decent food was to imitate the things they liked but to cook them myself, using good fresh ingredients. Hamburgers make a very nutritious meal if they are prepared from good-quality minced beef. Fishfingers made with fresh cod or haddock fillet and coated in freshly prepared breadcrumbs are a great alternative to the shopbought versions, and even thick-cut chips or potato wedges made at home contain lots of nutrients and less fat than the frozen variety. Although I realise this is hardly pushing the frontiers of flavour, at least Ellie and Lydia now know what real minced beef or fish tastes like. I have also persevered in trying to find ways of including ingredients they don’t like in their diet, so now, though they won’t eat leeks, for example, they love leek and potato soup.

Eating out regularly can help to stimulate children’s interest in food. Many parents are put off by the fear that their children will create an embarrassing noise and mess, but if kids are introduced to eating out early on they soon adapt to the different environment. Though they are only four, I regularly take Ellie and Lydia to Chinatown in London for dim sum or to Brick Lane for Indian food. Ethnic restaurants tend to have a friendlier, less stuffy approach to children, which means that everyone can relax. We order lots of small dishes and, though the girls certainly won’t eat everything, they don’t feel under any pressure so they tend to be more adventurous than usual. Eating ‘tapas style’ allows kids to experience a wide variety of different flavours at the same time and this is not something that can be easily recreated at home.

Another advantage of ethnic restaurants is that children are expected to eat the same food as adults. Going to a restaurant and ordering proper food for yourself and a ‘children’s menu’ of cheap sausages and chips for the kids totally defeats the purpose of taking them to a restaurant in the first place. Separating children’s food from adults’ can only add to the problem if you are trying to educate them to eat properly. For so many small children, dinner is something served in a plastic bowl at 6pm while their parents try and get on with something else. It’s no wonder that they fail to see it as an enjoyable social occasion. It is difficult for many families to eat together during the week because of early bedtimes and long working hours but at least we can try and redress the balance at weekends.

I believe that children do prefer to eat good food but a lot of them just don’t get the opportunity. Providing home-cooked meals for them is one way of making sure that they do. Cooking fresh ingredients is more labour-intensive than relying on convenience food but it is also more nutritious, more satisfying and less expensive (think of the price of a carrot compared to the price of a jar of carrot purée). The long-term gain is that the whole family becomes healthier and more adventurous in its tastes.

The recipes in this book are basically classic dishes or adaptations that I feel would be suitable for adults and children to enjoy together. On the whole they are very simple to make, because there’s no point spending an inordinate amount of time cooking something that your two-year-old might hate. Because children have such different tastes, they won’t like all the recipes, but persevere and they may well surprise you. When we took the kids to the London restaurant, St John, to meet Fergus Henderson, who had cooked up a big plate of pig’s tails, I could never have guessed that Ellie and Lydia would tuck in with such gusto.

I hope this book will encourage parents to make fresh food for their children. Sure, you can go out and buy a bottle of lemonade but making it yourself is easy, infinitely healthier and tastes of what it is supposed to taste of – fresh lemons. That’s really what this book is all about.

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