Help kids love their food
Cooking for childern shouldn’t be boring. Mum, chef and author of the new National Trust Family Cookbook, Claire Thomson tells KATE WHITING about her mission to tantalise young taste buds
‘I
DON’T serve plain pasta and my kids would think it was weird,” says Claire Thomson, family food ambassador for the National Trust, chef and mum-of-three.
“They’re excited by the food in front of them, the kitchen is the axis of my home life and I want them to feel that food is a really normal thing, that it’s not fetishised or not given enough credence.
“We’ve got a tiny kitchen but a great big kitchen table, because I think it’s important that (Claire’s 10-year-old daughter) Grace should be sitting there doing her spellings, or (four-year-old) Dot will be colouring in while I’m cooking – it’s just day-to-day a real normalcy around food.”
If this sounds like a manifesto for how to give kids a love of good food, it is. Claire, 37, has spent five years showing the world exactly how we could be feeding children through her daily ‘5oclockapron’ Instagram and Twitter posts.
The dishes she makes for her daughters at five o’clock each day include sumptuous-looking bowls of ‘tamarind & turmeric chicken broth with soba noodles & cucumber’, or ‘seared monkfish with potatoes, chard stalks, serrano ham & rosemary’.
Two years on from her debut cookbook, The Five O’Clock Apron, Claire has now penned the National Trust Family Cookbook. The recipes in it are categorised by how long they take to cook, with sections for on-the-go breakfasts and lunch box alternatives, from Yogurt and Cardamom Chicken Wraps and Pea and Halloumi Fritters to Vietnamese Noodle Salad – all with substitute ingredients so you can suit your family’s tastes.
“The recipes are all pretty easy. It takes three minutes to slop some chicken thighs in a bowl in the morning, drop some yogurt on and cardamom and stick it in the fridge. Then when you get back from work, you’ve just got to bang that in a hot oven – the longest thing to do is preheat the oven.
“Then you chop a quick salad and make tzatziki, which the children can help with, it’s just mint and yogurt.
“It’s really important to get them to help you, otherwise the food lands in front of them and they’re expected to eat it,” Claire adds. “They should set the table or pour the water. There’s a community to being in a family; I don’t want to be running a restaurant for my children until they’re 18 and leave home!”
She’s not an advocate for ‘hiding’ vegetables, either.
“Hiding seven different types of vegetables in a pizza sauce is fundamentally what I think is wrong about children’s food.
“It’s really important you identify vegetables and acknowledge they’re on their plate and they know why they’re good for them, rather than hiding them. I find it absolutely laughable!”
Now based in Bristol, Claire was born in Zimbabwe and travelled “extensively” with her New Zealander husband, before they settled in the UK to raise their daughters Grace, seven-year-old Ivy, and Dot.
Another of Claire’s projects to engage children with food is a collaboration called Table Of Delights (tableofdelights.com).
It started as a theatre show and is now a website designed to educate kids about food through wacky song and dance numbers, facts and recipes. “We want to get them excited through a Trojan horse of entertainment, so they don’t feel they’re being preached to.”
Claire is not a total stranger to fussy eaters, admitting: “Dot’s not a saint – there are some days she just wants to eat boiled eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner”.
“That’s fine, but I don’t let her do it every day, and I don’t let her say she doesn’t like vegetables because I’m a chef and I make them taste nice!
“I think fussy eaters are a problem, but you just carry on and eventually, they turn a corner and start eating.”
Try some of Claire’s recipes with your family. National Trust Family Cookbook by Claire Thomson (left) is published by the National Trust Books, priced £15.