Nourished by nurture

Image via WikipediaI found this great article in that it not only teaches about the values of cooking, but getting the young to enjoy cooking, and eating - the right way.

I shouldn't take away the good of finding out by yourself what the author is saying here, so I'll stop here and you go ahead.

Do  take note that there are recipes and many other valuable articles that you can find in the source website, so if you are keen, follow the link at the bottom after reading.

Read on...
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Nurturing by nourishing
Teaching children to cook can undo bad eating habits, introduce healthier foods

By Su-Mei Yu

My grandson, Thomas, is 7 years old. He does not eat green vegetables, except for edamame or cooked and salted soybeans. As a toddler, he devoured canned baby food of chicken and broccoli. However, since he has discovered pasta, feta and parmesan cheese and chocolate, he has banned green vegetables from his diet.

His older sister, Claire, who is 11, is no better. Known as the hard-to-please eater in the family, her diet is limited to processed meat such as salami and pepperoni, cheeses, bread and yogurt. Recently, because of campaigns at schools to get kids to eat more healthy foods, Claire has begun to eat raw carrots, broccoli and cauliflower. Maggie, the middle child, is the best eater among the three children. She will try anything at least once — except seafood.

My grandchildren are typical of many American children, raised in the land of plenty and affluence, where parents let them decide what to eat. To someone from an older generation, this practice seems to be a new phenomenon.

When I was growing up, our family ate everything my mother cooked — with no questions asked. We were expected to finish everything on our plate. My mother never cooked separate dishes for children. Subsequently, we learned to appreciate endless varieties of foods with different tastes, flavors and textures.

More recent generations of parents appear to think that their kids know best. Or, perhaps, everyone in the family is so busy that at dinnertime all we want is to have our children eat something — anything. So, our children end up choosing and eating addictive foods that are laden with lots of fats, salt and sugar.

My grandchildren are good examples of the challenge facing us. How do we get our young ones to eat healthy foods? Most importantly, how do we convince them to eat vegetables?

I have eaten healthy foods all of my life. I am also a cook and a cookbook writer. I’ve been invited to write a regular column featuring children’s ideas and recipes for preparing seasonal vegetables, dishes that they will want to eat. In doing so, I hope that not only children such as my grandchildren will begin to eat more vegetables; I also hope to teach them to appreciate how vegetables are grown and how they mature. And in the process, we can develop an understanding of the relationship between the environment and healthy food. Most of all, I would like to get children in the kitchen with the adults in the family, to learn to cook. I believe cooking is a part of the cultural fabric that holds families together and promotes the well-being of our society.

Besides, cooking can be fun — really!

The first recipe here is a creation of my grandson, Thomas. He calls it Veggie Pasta. He not only chose the vegetables he wanted in his pasta, including corn and carrots; he also prepared them. He diced the carrots and helped mix corn into the whole-grain pasta that his mother helped him cook. While dicing carrots, he thought that his pasta needed more color, and so he came up with edamame. He pondered seriously whether he should put his favorite feta cheese in his creation, since other children might not like it. We had a serious discussion about this, and I convinced him that this was his recipe and he should make it the way he would like it.

Since Thomas knows nothing about cooking, his mother suggested that the pasta should be baked after being mixed with the vegetables and cheese. Thomas didn’t agree. He thought the feta cheese would become “bland,” or in other words, lose its sharp flavor. He was right.

Granddaughter Claire had been thinking about our little project. She had taken cooking classes last summer and loved them. Claire believes kids will eat something that not only tastes good but looks good, because pretty and artistically presented food is more appealing. She didn’t want any blah-looking food with everything all mishmashed together. Her mother bought prepackaged multiple-colored cauliflower and broccoli florets from Trader Joe’s.

Claire decided to make vegetable nachos with them. She baked the dish for about 4 minutes in a preheated oven, so that the florets were still raw and crunchy. They were delicious — and Claire actually ate them.

Maggie, in the middle, had a girlfriend over to do a school art project. She did not have the time to cook, but both the girls and the adults ate Thomas and Claire’s creations.

We congratulated them on being talented cooks, and on their winning recipes.

Taken from SignOnSanDiego.com; source article is below:
Nurturing by nourishing

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