Healthy Food for Kids

I was lucky with my first child - she eats everything. She is not fussy with food and will try anything at least once and has quite a sophisticated palette for a kid. It’s great. My second child is now 18 months old and unfortunately she has a sweet tooth so is difficult to encourage away from anything that isn’t sweet. I think this is because she saw her older sister having treats, she of course tried some too and all in all I believe that she was introduced to sweet treats far too early. The bane of being the second child I suppose.

So I have joined in the chorus call that is all too familiar across the land of parenting - how do I get my child to eat more veggies?! She does eat pretty healthy I think I just want to encourage her to balance out her sweet and savoury choices.

I made myself an iced coffee and sat down to discover Veggie Smugglers, One Handed Cooks and a few great blogs like Natural New Age Mum, amoung others. I browsed around these sites and went crazy over on pinterest pinning ideas then started experimenting in the kitchen.

We had some green pesto pasta where I made the pesto with cannellini beans - which they loved.

We snacked on apple cinnamon popcorn while we read through more recipe books from the library.

We had mini pizzas where I hid grated up veggies underneath the meat and cheese.

We snacked on peanut butter and greek yoghurt dip with our apple slices while I dehydrated some mixed veggies for sprinkling on just about everything.

I made some little vegetable “cakes” which were a winner and were demolished without a second thought. Surprisingly this was literally grated up vegetables with a ground cauliflower base and cheese on top. I cheated a little and added a touch of bribery with a few bits of bacon diced up on top too.

And I reverted to some good old favourites like veggie chicken balls.

I even baked a pumpkin cake and while I was tempted, I avoided making the cream cheese frosting to go on top.

After all that I don’t feel quite so doomed and feel like I was successful in filling their tummies with good healthy food that wasn’t boring or tasteless or simply thrown all over the floor.

Have you got a winning healthy meal idea or some go-to sites that you want to share?