This year's summer holiday craze seems to be cooking camps for children.  This appears to be the seemingly perfect way to encourage children to learn about food sourcing and cooking without making mess at home.  Simultaneously, there have been various recent newspaper features on adventurous recipes to cook at home with primary school age children. In our national acknowledgement that children need to be educated about what they are eating to create a healthier Britain, are we in danger of over-complicating the process?

How to encourage children, be they your own, your nieces/nephews, godchildren or cousins to eat healthy local food is a constant challenge. Love British Food, alongside government and non-government organisations, are passionate about healthy eating, sourcing local food and dispelling the obesity shadow that ominously lurks over the younger generation. All over the country, children's cookery courses are booming.  Of course, this is no bad thing.  Many of the children will come home inspired to try to re-create the dishes at home. Also, if you never cook with your children, it seems far better to outsource and pay someone else to teach meringue making to your offspring.  A spontaneous cooking session at home with a non-rehearsed recipe will only end in mess and stress.

However, the image of children enjoying and understanding what they eat mustn't become distorted into a dreaded chore.  There is pressure on parents because, ultimately, what and how they eat themselves has the greatest influence on their children.  There are foodie parents who are constantly cooking and sourcing and expanding their culinary repertoire, and therefore via osmosis their children's repertoire at the same time.  Their children have eaten nettle soup by two and shark by three.  But this must not intimidate the parents who are time-poor and less confident in the kitchen.  Children do not need to have tasted everything by the age of four, there is plenty of time to discover different tastes and textures.  In any case encouraging a penchant for expensive food may not be such a sensible idea.  The priority is that children should be able to find eating a pleasurable experience.  One in which they understand the origins of what they are eating and the nutrients that lie within their food.  The best way to achieve this should not be costly or all that time consuming.

The truth is, to improve children's eating habits the young need to be involved in food preparation on a daily basis, not just for an impulsive cookery session in the kitchen in the holidays. Involvement in meal preparation covers a vast spectrum, be it picking the herbs or vegetables from the garden, laying the table, stirring the simmering onion, kneading the pizza base, putting the jacket potatoes into a cold oven and switching the oven on, being in charge of the timer, grating the cheese or making the sandwiches. The parent's main pressure is not in presenting a gourmet feast but in the menu-planning and ensuring that they take part in children's mealtimes by sitting with them, even if they are not eating.  

If you do the weekly shop online, try doing it every other week and turn going to the supermarket or farmers' market with your child into a fun activity.  Go to the cheese counter together and ask to taste different cheeses until you find one you both like.  Cheese is great in moderation because even the cheapest British cheddar does not contain additives and is rich in calcium and protein.  Visit the fish counter and look at the different produce and where it comes from. Challenge your child to find British fruit and vegetables in the supermarket aisles.  The brilliant thing about going to a butcher's counter is that it is a cheaper way of buying meat, i.e. you end up only buying the amount of sausages you actually need. For these shopping trips to be effective, they have to be faced with a positive attitude and perseverance.   If children keep being involved in the food shopping process and are taken to pick-your-owns and to farm shops whilst seeing you prepare simple food from scratch, then not only will they eventually surrender and begin to enjoy food they previously thought inedible, but junk food will start to taste of the artificiality of which it is comprised .

Involving your child in the cooking process and keeping it simple are the key means of encouraging British food awareness.  Make boiled egg and soldiers. Source the eggs with your child - from a local farm, from your own chickens, or scan the supermarket shelf for the British red lion logo, together. Ask your child to fill the saucepan with water and make them in charge of the egg timer then lay the table and spread the butter on a piece of toast.  If necessary, help them to cut the toast into soldiers. Encourage them to find their preferred way of eating the egg, either by slicing the top off or peeling it.   

Another top tip is to minimise waste by making something together that the child is going to eat.  Invariably that will be something you eat on a regular basis.  If a child grows up watching their parents eating venison casserole, they will end up, despite initial protestations, enjoying and eating the same dish.  The same goes for pizza. Most gamekeepers' children eat pheasant. They have seen them as tiny birds, watched them grow and be killed, plucked and prepared for consumption.  If you are curry lovers then there is a great chance your children will grow up enjoying them too. What British food do you like?  What you eat on a daily basis sets the standard and interest levels of your child.  If your child loves fish fingers, why not ask them what makes breadcrumbs orange?  Then it should be fairly easy to move them away from ready-made ones and begin to make your own, homemade fish fingers together.  Let your child pummel bread in a plastic bag with a rolling pin to make the bread crumbs, then give them the fun job of dousing the fish in them.  To encourage a sense of pride, why not ask your child to invite a friend over to join in eating the fish fingers for tea?

If you regularly have roast lunch on Sundays, discuss with your child which meat to cook and give them various tasks.  Picking herbs for the stuffing, sticking cloves in an onion for a bread sauce and helping to prepare the vegetables can all be fun activities.  If your child is not keen on carrots, don’t blend them up and hide them in something that disguises them. Emphasise the merits of carrots. Grow your own, pick your own, get them to wash the carrots and then prepare them in a variety of ways – raw, sautéed with orange juice, boiled - and then ask them to taste each method, mark it out of 5 and go from there. Where you obtain your food is almost more important than what you do with it.

Involving children with meal preparation at home, needs to be an everyday natural process.  Don't give up, as they are learning every time a meal is made.  Many of us have very busy lives, which is why it is so important to keep the menu at home fun, simple and British.

For some suggestions of cookery courses for children [click here]

This month, The Sauce tests out Caramelised Carrots by Rose Prince…

The Sauce

Caramelised Carrots by Rose Prince

• What ingredients did you use and how readily available were they?
  500g carrots, which I am proud to say, were grown by me and my niece.
  The tablespoon of butter and tablespoon of demerara sugar were from my store cupboard.


• What was the sum total cost of this meal?
  A big fat zero.


• How many people did it actually feed?
  4, as it says on the recipe


• How long did it take and how easy was it?
  We boiled the carrots for 5 minutes then, drained them and added the sugar and butter.  We stirred the mixture over the heat until they caramelised.  My 6 year-old niece did the topping and tailing of the carrots and the placing of the spoonfuls of butter and sugar in the pan.  She was also in charge of timing the carrots.


• What did you do with the leftovers?
  My niece has always despised carrots, despite the fact she has grown some this year.  The objective was to find a recipe that meant she could start to enjoy eating the vegetable.  We served them in a bowl, as a snack, and her brother and mother helped us eat them.  There were no leftovers.


• What did you and your guests think of the meal?
  Everyone enjoyed them, most importantly my niece.


• Would you cook it again?
  It is a definite 'treat' way of serving carrots but a good way to encourage that first taste.  I think I will cook them again alongside a roast chicken.

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