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If you have a fussy eater, these kids tiffin recipes will help! 'How to get your child to eat' made easy.
By Lavanya Donthamshetty
So, how do you feed the fussy eater? Here are some healthy recipes for kids plus tips to get your child to eat better!
No amount of begging or pleading will bend their will to suit our purposes and this is where the mum’s best weapon comes into play – stealth. If your child will not eat the egg yolk under any circumstances, giving them a boiled egg for breakfast and then haranguing them for not obliging will not help your frayed nerves one bit.
My son fell into this category – one fine morning, he decided that he’ll have nothing to do with the egg, especially the ‘yucky, yellow bit’. So I made him eat the white with the spoon and mashed the yolk into his sandwich filling.
Children go off certain foods for the strangest of reasons. What they gulped down happily till the previous day might suddenly get labelled ‘YUCK!’. My son, when he was five, suddenly decided to stop eating tomatoes. Why? Because a friend of his told him eating tomatoes will cause him to turn red! Seriously! From where do children come up with such things?
From my personal experience and from asking other mums, here are the top five ways of fooling your fussy eater. Use these tips to make lunch or tiffin for kids healthy and interesting!
Call it ‘vegetable dosa’ and your child may balk at it. Label it ‘pizza dosa’ and it just might go down easier. But make your claim good – scatter finely diced colourful veggies like deseeded tomatoes, onions, sweet corn or paneer and present it to them with some home-made ketchup, complete with a fork and a knife for them to cut up their ‘pizza’.
Noon, a blogger pal is famous in certain circles for her recipe of avocado paratha. My kids, who found the highly nutritious avocado inedible, fell in love with the ‘Shrek Chapati’. The mashed avocado mixed in with the chapati dough turned it a shade of green that was a major hit with them thanks to Dreamworks. This worked similarly well with spinach. Enterprising mums can mash and mix all kinds of forbidden veggies thus.
It surely does – when children are raring to go and shed their energy, tying them down to the chair and making them eat a meal off the plate may be well nigh impossible. Whizzing some fruits with whole milk is a much easier way to get some good stuff into them. Apples, strawberries, bananas, mangoes, oranges – anything that can be shaken with milk can be done so and fed to eager children. If your child hates milk but is okay with curd, then make smoothies with yogurt instead. Simple!
Does your little one like burgers? Or cutlets? Well then your battle is half won. Make a patty with cooked potato and hide all the dreaded vegetables (diced and steamed) into it, shallow fry using ghee, shove it between two buns (or skip buns if the kid says so), serve with lashings of homemade ketchup. Make some baked sweet potato/carrot fries with that and round off a treat meal.
My son is not very fussy and eats most things (and this includes bittergourd) but there is one thing that is guaranteed to make him open his mouth wider than normal. And that magic ingredient is cheese. Mozzarella, cheddar, ricotta or paneer he loves them all. Cheese triangles, grated cheeses, baked cheese; well, these are all ways to his heart. From what I’ve seen, most children are the same. So indulge them. Marinate paneer, bake it and serve for a yummy tea time treat. Dice into cubes and serve as cheese ‘kebabs’ by alternating with cubes of their favourite fruit and stringing them on a stick; grate a mix of cheeses and drizzle them on dishes to bump up the ‘oomph’ factor – cheese can lift any dish from being boring to yummy. Try it!
These are just a few ways of not letting your children get away with sidelining certain fruits and vegetables. I am sure you have more tricks up your sleeve. Why not share them in the comments section?
And finally, here is a fun recipe for pancake balls that kids will definitely love!
My children love pancakes – both the taste and the process of making it. The European pancakes are more like crepes, thin like dosas rather than the thick discs the Americans prefer. This is a fun variant of the dish that will bring a smile to your child’s face.
You’d need a kuzhi paniyaram chatti to make this.
Ingredients
Maida (plain flour) – 1 cup
Eggs – 2
Milk – 2 cups
Vanilla flavouring – 1 tsp
Salt – to taste
Sugar – 1 tsp
Ghee (clarified butter), as needed
A cup of diced soft fruits (banana / berries)
Method:
Beat the eggs well. Gently sieve the flour into this and keep mixing well with a fork, making sure no lumps are formed. Slowly add the milk, whilst stirring the mixture constantly. This is very important to get a smooth batter. Add a few drops of vanilla and stir it in.
Sprinkle salt and sugar, mix well and set aside for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, warm the kuzhi paniyaram pan. Once it heats up, add a dollop of ghee into each cup. Pour a ladleful of batter into each cup, taking care that it doesn’t overflow. Fill all the cups similarly. Cook for 3-4 minutes.
When the batter is not sloshing at the top of the cup, gently raise the edge of one ball to check if it is done. Tease the edge and slowly flip it over. Let it cook on the other side. Repeat for all the balls.
After two minutes, when everything is cooked, take off the pan and onto a plate. Scatter the diced fruits over the pancake balls and serve drizzled with maple syrup or honey.
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Neena was the sole caregiver of Amma and though one would think that Amma was dependent on her, Neena felt otherwise.
Neena inhaled the aroma that emanated from the pan and took a deep breath. The aroma of cumin interspersed with butter transported her back to the modest kitchen in her native village. She could picture her father standing in the kitchen wearing his white crisp kurta as he made delectable concoctions for his only daughter.
Neena grew up in a home where both her parents worked together in tandem to keep the house up and running. She had a blissful childhood in her modest two-room house. The house was small but every nook and cranny gave her memories of a lifetime. Neena’s young heart imagined that her life would follow the same cheerful course. But how wrong she was!
When she was sixteen, the catastrophic clutches of destiny snatched away her parents. They passed away in a road accident and Neena was devastated. Relatives thronged her now gloomy house and soon it was decided that she should be married off.
Being a writer, Nivedita Louis recognises the struggles of a first-time woman writer and helps many articulate their voice with development, content edits as a publisher.
“I usually write during night”, says author Nivedita Louis during our conversation. Chuckling she continues,” It’s easier then to focus solely on writing. Nivedita Louis is a writer, with varied interests and one of the founders of Her Stories, a feminist publishing house, based in Chennai.
In a candid conversation she shared her journey from small-town Tamil Nadu to becoming a history buff, an award-winning author and now a publisher.
Nivedita was born and raised in a small town in Tamil Nadu. It was for schooling that she first arrived in Chennai. Then known as Madras, she recalls being awed by the city. Her love-story with the city, its people and thus began which continues till date. She credits her perseverance and passion to make a difference to her days as a vocational student among the elite sections of Madras.
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