little LADIES WHO LUNCH

Post

Healthy meals for picky kids with lazy parents (by guest blogger Tiffany Ard)

I remember my dad digging through our harvest gold kitchen and laughing at his lunch options, “When did food become CUTE? Teeny weeny pizzas? Chicken shaped like miniature dinosaurs? I’m hungry and fruit rollups and baby croissants aren’t going to help.”

It was the new thing, my mom explained, easy nutritious food that kids love! This was before companies had to be clear about what ingredients when into their food; the wisdom at the time was that processed foods were made by scientists who could do a much better job of cooking than any regular person. The foods, it turned out later, were extremely high in salt, fat, sugar, and weird preservatives that cause people to grow up to be bloggers BUT the food industry wasn’t entirely nuts. They had done extensive research to confirm that kids will eat anything if you cut it into a cute shape.

This is one of the ways that adult minds differ from child minds — according to Piaget there are cognitive stages in every person’s life pertaining to food:
6 months - 1 year: the smear it around stage
1 - 3 years: the eat only one food stage
3-10 years: the prefer cute foods stage
11-17 years: eat only what your friends agree is cool stage
18+: alternate between smugly eating whatever the latest research agrees is healthy and eating pure chocolate soaked in wine with bread and cheese on the side.

When our kids are in those earlier stages, parents will do anything to avoid feeling guilty. And that includes making the sacrifices necessary to buy tiny little cookie cutters and containers and ohhhh my gosh look! Veggie sprinkles made of vegetables! I will have to buy those and put them on the rice and it will be so cute that they’ll have to eat it! That’s why the internet is full adorable blogs full of adorable food ideas for adorable kids and oh my goodness I’m so impressed whenever I see those things because they are spectacularly insanely adorable HOW do those people have time to do all of this?

If you don’t have kids you probably roll your eyes at overindulgent first-world parents who feel the need to decorate their kids’ lunches when a plain brown ham sandwich would do just fine. But if you do have kids you know that cute food isn’t just about indulging your kids or filling your spare time (HAHA get it? Spare — ah…hahaha). It’s about making sure the kids don’t chuck their lunches or trade them away for Little Debbie oatmeal cream pies. It’s about fighting marketing with marketing and — oh I wish there were a nicer word for this but there isn’t — manipulating our kids into eating food that we feel good about giving them.

Plus serving cute food is sort of FUN for us because all those chemicals in our food in the 70s and 80s warped our brains causing us to grow up to be complete dorks about the most random stuff. Drudgery of feeding our families? Oh yes, we are happy to be dorks about that.

That said, I’m also lazy. Real lazy. The nice LLWL blogging lady gasps with horror at my laziness. While she is glazing the fish and scrubbing the peas and chopping the scones, I’m staring into my cabinet thinking “I cannot believe they’re hungry again.” She adores mastering a great recipe; I get frustrated cooking meals that my kids decide not to eat. Planning ahead to make sure I’ve soaked the lentils and brined the chicken and glossed the hogswallops is a lovely vision but it isn’t realistic for me.

For me the question is: how can I make sure I’m feeding my kids healthy, wholesome balanced diet in a fun, appealing way without sacrificing my commitment to laziness?

So here’s how I survive:

First! I had to abandon the idea that certain foods go with other foods because kids don’t care about that. Raisins go with peanut butter and both of those go with chicken.

Second, stock a huge variety of foods that are healthy, natural, and EASY. And in the summer time, when the oven heats up the whole house until it’s so hot that you want to cry, no oven.

basics

If we run out of any of these foods, everybody panics.

Here’s some of our staples: cheese in various forms, nuts, no-cook veggies like cucumbers, celery, and carrots, stone ground whole wheat bread, and a large assortment of fruits. We try to always always have those things on hand, which means that we are always less than five minutes away from a meal.

Fruit!

Note: allowing your son’s pet lovebird into a kitchen violates numerous public health codes.

Third: Acquire cute little trays.

Tray full of everything

This is a typical meal for my kids — they call it the Tray Full of Everything

Fourth: The minute anyone says they’re hungry, run into the kitchen and grab whatever and just start cutting things into shapes. Let the older kids help unless you think they might use the knife to try and seize control of your home. You know your own child’s ability to rally the support of other children and pets in a spontaneous mutiny better than anyone.

Five: Arrange those shapes into some kind of shape or pattern.

Tree!

Sometimes the trays aren’t clean. Oh no! A plate! This snackish meal includes celery with natural peanut butter, cucumbers, ham (natural, no nitrates etc etc), granny smith apple, yellow apples, cheese, red bell peppers.

Birdie