Top tips from a mum who never gave up on getting her fussy eater to nosh fruit and veg!

14 October 2013

Well as you’ve probably guessed, that mum is me. To say that my middle son was a fussy eater (notice the past tense) is the understatement of the century: he was the eater from hell! Once he had turned into a very cute toddler, there was not a single vegetable or fruit that he would eat. No kidding. It was that bad. This came as a shock, given that Big Brother not only ate everything with relish but even thought – wait for it – that Brussels sprouts were delicious! So all those years ago I went into overdrive to keep my fussy eater unwittingly healthy. It became my mission and has remained so ever since.

My first observation was that despite what all the books kept telling me, I could keep putting vegetables on Yanni’s plate ‘till the cows came home put nothing would induce him to touch them. Ever. He was 100% consistent in his objection to these health-giving foods and, at the same time, he was an ardent consumer of pasta, rice, and bread. So much so, that we named him the King of Carbs. But he wasn’t going to get away with it. Oh no! If the “keep offering it to him” strategy wasn’t going to work, then subterfuge was necessary, and that’s the route I took.

So let’s take a look at my top tips based on 12 years’ worth of a supremely fussy eater:

1. Perhaps the baby books still tell you to keep offering, keep trying… and I wouldn’t disagree. I would say the following: carry on offering the offending green leaves and parallel to that sneak as much goodness into the food they do like as possible. The belt and braces approach. But how?
    
2. Ok, so Yanni just adores stodge, by which I mean carbohydrates. Given half a chance he would fill up on bread and butter, white pasta and olive oil, couscous, and lots of rice. The answer? Create lots of sauces that are packed full of vegetables, seasoned with lots of delicious herbs or spices and which you then purée smooth so that there’s not a vegetable in sight and it all tastes yummy… with the accompanying stodge. Examples?
    
3. From my general dealings with kiddies I would suggest that pesto is very popular – it just has that “yum factor”, if you know what I mean. Conveniently, it is also green. So what I used to do was steam broccoli and then create a pesto sauce that was heavily laced with broccoli. We used to get through jar upon jar of pesto, all in the name of getting Yanni to swallow broccoli with his beloved pasta. It worked! You need to be a bit creative as broccoli and pesto alone are a bit dry, so think along the lines of adding a bit of sour cream to lengthen the sauce. Be sure to mix the sauce thoroughly into the pasta so that there’s absolutely no opportunity to separate the pasta out from the sauce and leave all the healthy bits untouched on the plate. Make it look attractive by sprinkling parmesan on top and crowning it with a basil leaf. When they refuse to eat the basil leaf on the grounds that it’s a vegetable, make it a great concession that you are “letting them off” eating the healthy part of the meal!
    
4. I have a couple of other endlessly tried and tested recipes which you can have a go at. Interestingly, I still use them on a regular basis and Yanni knows that they’re packed full of vegetables but because they taste delicious and have no bits in them, he wolfs them down. There’s the red lentil dhal with sweet potato and apricots in it – serve with basmati rice - and there’s the meatball pasta sauce with sweet potato or butternut in it too.
    
5. Fruit was a total disaster when he was little – my Yanni is very headstrong and there was not a hope in hell that a morsel of fruit would pass his lips. I mean come on, most kids eat banana, don’t they? Not he. A bit of lateral thinking had to be done. I started off by buying little pots of natural yogurt and emptying half the pot out and replacing it with baby fruit purée. Ok, I know that it is less nutritious than a piece of fruit – not so much fibre, few vitamins etc. But it’s significantly better than having nothing. So that was one ruse.
    
6. Having established the half-fruit-half-yogurt approach, I moved things up a gear. In the baby food section of the supermarket I found fruit purées in pots that resembled yogurt pots. At the time, Yanni was really keen on superheroes, and so I slapped a Spiderman sticker on top of each fruit purée pot and from then onwards called them yogurt! Yanni ate the “yogurt” and collected the Spiderman lids which he displayed on his bedroom door!
    
7. But for a real treat – and I make these to this day – my husband and I devised the ultimate hidden fruit pancakes. They are delicious, easy to make and packed with fruit. A total hit – you’ve got to try them!

Finally, I’d like to say “despair not” because if you just keep ploughing ever onwards and never ever ever give up, eventually you will succeed in getting your fussy eater to eat something of a vegetal nature. Whilst it is true that my beloved son still refuses to eat the vast majority of fruit and veg, he nevertheless consumes some form of greens every single day. It is heartening that curly kale, green beans, runner beans, spinach, mushrooms, chard, spring greens, cabbage, broccoli (no stalks!) and cavolo nero are all on the accepted menu… just so long as there’s a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil on them. Now there’s another tip: olive oil opens many a gateway!

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