EMMA FREUD

Quick and healthy breakfasts for kids, minus the morning fuss,

Preparing food from scratch that kids actually want to eat takes time

The time has come to tackle the thorny issue of schoolday breakfasts. In our house, it’s not a pretty afair: after my children have slept through the frst four attempts to wake them, grumbled into their clothes, lost their shoes and taken quite a lot of time to not make their beds or tidy their rooms, there’s usually only about eight minutes left for the eating part of the morning, until it’s time for them to mislay their homework, get shouted at for forgetting to brush their teeth and be late leaving for school.

Of these eight breakfast minutes, about fve are spent in a battle about what to eat. ‘Scrambled eggs?’ ‘Not again – could I have Coco Pops?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Same reason as yesterday – too much sugar. Toast and marmite?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Hooray.’ ‘As long as it’s nice sliced white bread, not that brown stuf you make.’ ‘Then no.’ ‘Frosties?’ ‘Nope, same reason as the Coco Pops.’ ‘OK, how about pancakes?’ ‘Well, that would have been a good idea, but there isn’t time now.’ And so it goes on. Daily.

It was not always thus in the UK. The whole breakfast cereal, bagel, mufn thing is one we’ve fairly recently adopted from the US. But somehow we’ve become the biggest consumers of packets of processed cereals in the world. Whereas the Mediterraneans get through

1kg per person per year, in the UK the average person easts 7kg of cereal per year. According to a former royal chef, even Her Actual Majesty The Queen likes fakes of corn or bran for breakfast. Clearly Prince Charles hasn’t fully explained to her that most boxed cereals are pufed, faked, favoured, shaped, sugared and salted, stripping the grain of nutrients, which then have to be added back in using chemical versions so that the manufacturers can declare on the packet that technically it’s good for you.

If you decide to take a hard line on sugary breakfast cereals, the problem is that preparing healthy food from scratch, which children will actually want to eat, takes time – and schools don’t seem to recognise this when they insist on holding the morning assembly at 8.30am. Bircher muesli (soaked oats with fruit) needs to be made the night before, and who has ever remembered to do that? For pancakes, the ingredients need to be weighed properly with scales and ideally rested for 20 minutes before cooking. All the other really healthy dishes, like avocado on sourdough bread, or bran mufns, are impossible to get down the throat of any self-respecting child in 2018. Porridge is quick and nutritious, but my children refuse to eat it without an inch of sugar on top, which rather defeats the purpose. In fact, they’re so bored with me saying ‘we need to eat less sugar,’ that the youngest took to reading out the percentage of sugar per 100g from packets, in the full knowledge that I had no idea what qualifes as high or low. I’ve researched this now on behalf of us all, and can tell you that 5g sugar or less is low and anything over 22.5g is high. For additional ammo, 4g of sugar is one teaspoon, which helps to put it into context. This all means that, when he says ‘But this one is healthy. Look – only 35g of sugar,’ I can knowledgably put it back on the shelf while shaking my head and tutting ‘that’s nine teaspoons’ worth – no chance.’ And don’t be fooled by the portion sizes. The box of one leading brand labels ‘a portion’ as 45g. I asked my son to pour himself a normal-sized bowl of it, and he poured out 90g. That quantity has 18g of sugar – one teaspoon of sugar more than a Milky Way.

Sadly, there’s no point turning to low-fat yogurt as a healthy alternative. Because it has less fat and is therefore less satisfying to eat, many companies use sugar to dial up the favour. For example, a regular serving of one fat-free honey yogurt has around 32g of sugar in it – that’s 2g more than a small packet of Wine Gums.

So, while the food industry works towards the UK Government’s target of reducing overall sugar content by 20% by 2020, my mission this month has been to create a healthy breakfast that can be made from scratch in fve minutes, and which a picky child will happily eat. First up, the instant smoothie, which contains carefully concealed oats for slow-release energy, as well as plenty of milk and fruit. Job half-done in a thirty-second whizz. And then – my miracle solution – three-minute banana blender pancakes: fve ingredients, no weighing, no processed sugar, easy to cook and gorgeous.

I tried them on my boys this morning, and the verdict was ecstatic (for teenagers at 7.30am). ‘Yeah, OK, they’re not bad. In fact they’re quite good I suppose.’ ‘Guess how much processed sugar?’ ‘How much?’ ‘Literally none.’ ‘Oh great – so I defnitely don’t need to brush my teeth today.’ As all parents know, you actually can’t win.

Good Food contributing editor Emma Freud is a journalist and broadcaster, director of Red Nose Day and a co-presenter of Radio Four’s Loose Ends.