How to Add Flavor to Your Child’s Sad, Tasteless Diet
My 5-year-old daughter said the ketchup was “hot”. Prefers beige products. Her ideal dinner is something like dinosaur nuggets and peas, cheese pizza and peas, plain udon and peas, potato cutlets and peas, ice cream and peas. Like a mom who once wrote about food, who travels straight to the spice section in local markets, savoring bold flavors and daydreaming about them long after a meal, I can’t help but wonder: where is it? Am I wrong?
That is, I have ideas. In a day-to-day setting, expanding my child’s culinary palate was admittedly not a priority – I’m often in a rush to eat and mostly happy while my child is eating something green (thanks peas). But I want to be better. How to add flavor to your child’s sad and tasteless diet? Parents of more daring eaters shared some tips.
Start early
There is no reason why baby food should be exclusively pureed banana and avocado. Even the youngest eaters can mostly eat what you have. Kimberly, a parent of the Offspring Facebook group , says that when her daughter was a baby, she added spices to food “just to get used to the flavors.” She sprinkled eggs with turmeric and pepper, fruits with cinnamon, and peas and other soft vegetables with curry powder. “I mostly rummaged through my pantry looking for something to use,” she says.
No need to cook baby food from scratch – Kimberly sometimes added seasonings to ready-to-eat meals from the store. But if you want to save even more time, several baby food delivery companies will send you fresh, flavorful meals. Yumi , for example, has interesting face-to-face farming options such as the classic French ratatouille and Indian mulligatoni.
You can also try Baby-Led Weaning (BLW) , a method of introducing solid foods to babies without spoon feeding them. Many parents say this method has helped their children become more interested in new tastes than suspicious of them.
Avoid “baby food”
Baby food — poppy and cheese, chicken sticks, quesadillas, pizza bagels, fried cheese, simple burgers, and other status quo foods — are hard to avoid. This is what is on the kids’ menu , served at birthday parties, and is part of the schedule of many family dinners because of how reliably the kids will eat it. There’s a reason kids love it: the basics of biology. Lynn Burch, a research psychologist at the University of Georgia, tells NPR that babies are “born with a preference for salty and sweet,” and it’s up to parents to help them overcome neophobia, “an inbuilt response to something new.”
Clovis, another mum on the Offspring Facebook group, says that in her home, baby food is “special occasion food,” like when other kids come to her place. I like it. One mistake we make with our child is to give her our own meals on a regular basis. Hey, I like to eat what I like – hot curries, pepper noodle dishes, anything on the Scoville scale – and it’s easy enough for my child to do whatever he wants (noodles, nuggets, pizza – her wishes are great . limited). But experts suggest limiting the possibilities of baby food. In schools in France, where children obviously eat everything, there is always only one option on the menu . With this method, you can introduce your child to a variety of new foods and flavors day after day.
It’s all about attitude
Children need to feel like they are getting to taste the scents — not that they are forced to try them. Michelle, a mom of Offspring’s Facebook group, says: “I always let my son taste what I eat and try not to comment. As soon as I started paying attention, I noticed that many adults say something like, “You won’t like this” or “This is too hot.” I’m just passing the food. He likes a lot of things that I thought he wouldn’t. ” You can offer your child a low pressure “plate of taste” filled with new things they may or may not want to try. Samantha Barnes, founder of children’s cooking club raddish , tells me that the food often becomes tastier for children when they had a hand in its preparation. They can try making hummus, Spanish gazpacho or salsa and have a tasting ceremony at the end.
Clovis adds: “I think the main thing is that my kids see me eat and enjoy the spiced food, and I just expect them to eat it with me. “It’s not ‘spicy’ food, it’s just dinner.”
Introduce flavors gradually
Not all children will water their plates with sriraha, and that’s okay. They themselves must find their own level of comfort. So introduce the flavors gradually. A dad named Andrew says it’s good to have a simple, mild-to-medium hot sauce on hand, like chili peppers. “I made it clear that my daughter should dip her food in it a little, and not eat it on a spoon by itself,” he says. One of my friends says her kids love kimchi, but she always rinses them a little before feeding them.
Clovis kids also love fermented Korean foods. But it took some parenting effort to get there. Clovis says of kimchi jeong, a type of pancake, “I would say something like, ‘DON’T TAKE MY KIMCHI JONG! »YOU DO NOT HAVE ANYTHING. And I would eat them and greatly exaggerate my pleasure, which is not difficult to do. And obviously they had to steal them, and now they are a special treat. Like chicken nuggets.