Snacktastic - smoothies

Are your family like mine? During the weekly shop I'll go and buy a punnet of strawberries to replace the half eaten one in the fridge... thereby dooming the slightly older (but still perfectly viable) fruit to wallow in its uneaten misery, always overlooked by my family in their quest to eat only the newest, freshest produce.

Well, I have a solution, and it's a tasty one. Smoothies!

Smoothies are an easy way to increase your family's fruit consumption, and they are simple to make. I usually just mix the base ingredients with whatever I can find in the fridge and blend it with a stick mixer.
Here are a couple of our favourites:

Start with the smoothie base:
1 cup milk, 2 tablespoons natural yoghurt (or icecream), and ice cubes

Then add...

Banana
1 cup banana, 1 tablespoon honey, cinnamon to taste.

Berry
Half a punnet of strawberries, raspberries or blueberries

Mango
1 cup mango, 3/4 cup orange juice

Spinach
This doesn't use the base, just blend 1 cup raw spinach with 2 oranges, an apple and some ice cubes with 2/3 cup of water. It's surprisingly delicious and very green - nickname it monster juice and it will go down a treat.

(Just a note - smoothies are generally not suitable for kids under one as they should be avoiding large servings of cows milk as well  strawberries and honey.)

Do you have any favourite smoothie recipes?

Working up an appetite

So we've looked at a starting point to spring clean your family's nutrition, but it can be a real challenge convincing your young audience that these changes are a good idea. Over the next few weeks we'll look at a couple of ways for making healthy food fun, but for now lets get back to basics - appetite.

Remember that bite of hunger after an afternoon racing around in the fresh air, or that ravenous feeling after a long swim at the pool?

Exercise helps kids to sleep well, lowers blood cholesterol, decreases the risk of type two diabetes, and strengthens muscles and bones. And, more pertinently to our topic, it builds an appetite. The saying "hunger is the best sauce" was never truer. Send the kids outside to work up a hunger or, even better, set the example and get out there with them.

If your need more convincing, this is what the website of Greenhour had to say:

Today's kids spend far less time outside than their parents did. For many of them, tweets are not bird calls but 140-character sound bites. Wii, the electronic game, has replaced "wheee!" -- the squeal of delight. (Www.greenhour.org)

The Green Hour organisation is encouraging parents to give their children the gift of at least one hour of unstructured, outdoor playtime a day.

"As one scientist puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature." (Richard Louv, author of "The Last Child in the Woods".)

So how can we use this technique to help? If you time the introduction of healthier foods (that you suspect might be a difficult sell) to a time when the kids are hungry you have a better chance of them being accepted.  This is doubly true if there are no other options available. And the perfect way to converge these two tactics is on a picnic!

Fill the water bottles, make some salad sandwiches, head out for an active morning and a healthy lunch and see if hunger wins the day.

Do you picnic with your family? What are your favourite picnic foods? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

How much? Portion sizes

Hands up if you've ever fallen into a food rut with your family. Life floods in and you end up treading water, dishing up the same old guaranteed crowd pleasing meals day after day after day..... with very little thought to the nutrition balance. Is your hand up? Mine is too.

Well, it's spring down here in Australia, so it's time to spring clean your family's nutrition.

The first step is to know what you are aiming for. The information below is an outline of the daily nutritional needs of a four to eight year old child, and it's based on the five food groups, with "sometimes foods" added in too.

Fruit
1-2 serves per day
1 serve = one medium sized piece of fruit, or about one cup

Vegetables
2-4 serves per day
1 serve = 1/2 cup of cooked vegetables, or 1 cup of salad

Dairy
2-3 serves per day
1 serve = 1 cup of milk, or 2 slices of cheese, or 1 small tub of yoghurt

Bread, Cereals and Grains
3-7 serves per day
1 serve = 2 slices of bread, or 1 cup of cereal, or 1 cup of cooked rice, pasta, noodles, or porridge, or 1/2 a cup of muesli

Protein
1 serve per day
1 serve = 1/2 cup of mince, or 2 small eggs, or 2 chops, or 1/2 cup cooked lentils or beans, or 1/3 cup nuts, or 1/4 cup sunflower seeds, or the child's palm sized serving of fish

"Sometimes Foods"
0-2 serves per day
1 serve = 1 doughnut, or 4 biscuits, or 1 small slice of cake, or 1/2 small bar of chocolate, or 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise, or 1 tablespoon butter

Scale the serves depending on the activity level and size of your kid, and scale portion sizes up and down for older and younger children, keeping the balance between the food groups about the same.

So, here's a basic meal plan example from that guidance:

Breakfast
1 cup cereal (low sugar, please) with 1/2 cup milk

Morning tea
1 piece of fruit

Lunch
A sandwich of 1 cup salad and 2 slices of cheese

Afternoon tea
A few biscuits with 1/2 glass milk

Dinner
2 chops, 1 cup pasta, 1/2 cup cooked vegetables

Sounds pretty simple when it's laid out, really, and the chances are you're already feeding your little ones a very similar diet. But if not, take the opportunity for a spring clean and find a balance that suits your family.

(The information in this post is from the Australian Government, supported by Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne, the Parenting Research Centre and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute) 

Snacktastic - celery canoes

Our Snacktastic Saturday idea this week? It's a classic for a reason - ants on a log or, in our house, "little people in a canoe". 

It's just celery (well washed and dried)  filled with peanut butter...

 and some sultanas to top. Substitute cottage cheese for the peanut butter if you have nut allergies. 

We like to add grape oars and a flag, too.

It's a delicious mix of salty and sweet, crunchy and soft, and from a parental perspective the protein in the peanut butter will keep them full, while the celery has B and C vitamins as well as potassium, folic acid, calcium, magnesium, iron, phosphorus, and amino acids. It's easy for little people to help make, too. Yum!

Place settings for small people

I have a great deal of trust in my kids capabilities, and I want to convince you to have trust in yours. "But I do!" I hear you cry. Sure, when it comes to most things, but what about *dumdum* the family china?

My toddler eats off the same china that my husband and I do. She drinks from a real glass, and uses proper metal cutlery. And we've never had a serious breakage or accident.

It all started when my eldest was 20 months old and we moved interstate, necessitating a three week hotel stay. Up until then she had been eating off and with plastic, but I had forgotten her bowls and spoons in my pregnant removal haze. I had no choice but to give her the real deal, and to my surprise she did really well.

We use smaller versions of plates, cups and cutlery. Here are a couple of ideas to get you started:

Maxwell Williams makes lovely kids cutlery. It's simple, pleasantly unadorned with kitschy motifs, and it has a nice weight and smooth feel. The knife is too blunt for yoghurt, but the soup spoon is a good depth - many of the children's cutlery I found had spoons that were almost flat and therefore useless.

Maxwell Williams also makes a line of colourful demitasse coffee cups. Perfect for babychinos, just like Daddy's.

I picked up a set of six espresso glasses from Wheel and Barrow. They are perfect for little hands, and as an added bonus they hold only a small amount. This may sound counter intuitive (more refills) but it is a great size  for juice or other sugar treat drinks as the serving is so small. For healthy drinks like water I just provide a water jug on the table and tell myself that it's good practice in pouring skills. 

For plates we simply use a side plate and a small dessert bowl from our dinner set.

So, if you have a little one who has sufficient coordination and a careful demeanor, why not upgrade their dining experience? It's great for them to feel included, and (the bit I love) the plates and cutlery are now dishwasher safe.

Curb the hunger - add protein

Ever had your kids clean their plate, and then five minutes later you hear "I'm hungry?" arrgghh!

Of course, they could just be on a growth spurt, but if this is an ongoing problem it's time to find a solution.

And the answer? Protein.

While it's healthy to provide buckets of fruit and veggies, and it's easy to crack out a cracker or give them a bit of bread, this is not going to fill those little bellies for long. The key to satiety is the addition of a small serve of protein, and it's quite simple to do.

Here are a couple of suggestions: A small block of cheese, some peanut butter, last night's left over lamb chop, some baked beans, yoghurt, a boiled egg, tinned tuna.

The other great thing about protein, of course, is that it's a building block for muscles, bones, hormones and skin, and contains iron, B vitamins, magnesium and Vitamin E and zinc. Win win!

Snacktastic - homemade microwave popcorn

Popcorn is a great snack. The fancy microwave popcorn goes down a treat with the youngsters here at Tiny Table, but it's expensive, greasy, salty, and who knows what's in the packaging?

Now there's a way to make your own that is super cheap, very healthy and just as easy. All you need is some popping corn and a paper bag.

Simply tip a quarter cup of corn into the paper bag, fold the bag top over firmly twice, then microwave until the pops slow down to a couple per second. Open it carefully (it will be full of steam) and enjoy.

If you prefer it lightly flavoured mix the quarter cup corn kernels with a teaspoon of olive oil and your seasoning of your choice before adding it to the bag. Salt is yummy, but cinnamon is delicious. I'm going to try chicken salt on mine next time.

(Head on over here if you want to watch the instructables video.)