Q&A with Debbie Koenig on Feeding Your Picky-Eaters!
We know that kids are picky-eaters and feeding them and you can be tricky! For our January Spotlight, we’ve brought in food writer Debbie Koenig and and the author of the cookbook Parents Need to Eat Too: Nap-Friendly Recipes, One-Handed Meals & Time-Saving Kitchen Tricks for New Parents to give some tips on how to feed yourself and your family!
It’s January, suddenly so many people start to focus on eating healthy. Do you have any tips on cooking healthy foods that the whole family will enjoy?
That’s always the challenge, isn’t it? The whole family should be able to eat the same meal! Cooking separately for kids just makes everyone crazy. In my book and on my blog, the recipes even include instructions for using what you’ve cooked as baby food–the sooner your kids are eating the same foods as you, the better.
As a food writer with a super-picky 7-year-old (we like to call him “non-nivorous”), I’m always trying to make meals that are exciting enough for the grownups but still offer something for the pickiest kids. The most reliable trick I’ve found is the make-your-own (fill in the blank). We’ve done pizza, taco salad, baked potato skins, Korean beef wraps, and even chicken pot pie that way. With pasta, I’ve got two options to make this work: Most often, I’ll cook the pasta and make the sauce–let’s say it’s a simple Puttanesca, tomatoes with olives, capers, and red pepper flakes. My son likes both olives and capers, though he’d never eat them as part of a sauce. So I serve the pasta and sauce separately, along with small bowls of olives and capers. My husband and I take the pasta with sauce, and junior serves himself plain pasta with olive oil, plus olives and capers on the side. I take a similar approach with baked pastas–I use ramekins so we each can have whatever we like in our meal. (That’s handy for portion control, too!)
Vegetables are an important part of the healthy diet, but are often hard to get kids to eat! Do you use any tricks to get your son to eat healthy meals?
I don’t stress too much about vegetables specifically. My son is a fruit fiend, so nutritionally he’s getting the full range of vitamins, etc. I’ve found that the more I push him to eat what I want him to eat, the less likely he is to do it. Someday he’ll come around! My husband says he was every bit as picky during his own childhood, and he’s now more adventurous than I am. I think the laid-back approach is beginning to work: Just in the last week, he’s been taking whole carrots from the crisper, peeling them himself, and wandering off eating them like Bugs Bunny. This after many months of insisting he only likes shredded carrots. Baby steps…
Your cookbook and blog, Parents Need To Eat Too, focuses on creating one meal which will satisfy the whole family. At Pasta Fits, we like to share healthy meals that fit into a busy schedule and a tight budget! This seems right up your ally – what is your favorite pasta meal that fits? Would you mind sharing the recipe?
That’s easy: Hail Mary Pasta. It was born out of desperation–after 6:00 one evening, when my husband and son were on their way home but I hadn’t given a thought to dinner. Basically, you roast whatever vegetables you have on hand in a really hot oven with some thinly sliced garlic–the only essential veg is some kind of tomatoes, which will provide the juicy “sauce”–while the pasta cooks, then toss it all together with a splash of the pasta-cooking water. The whole thing’s done in less than half an hour, and it’s a great way to use up the random zucchini, eggplant, or what-have-you going soggy in the crisper.
(View the full Hail Mary Pasta recipe)
If you could give new parents one piece of advice about how having kids can change the way you eat, what would it be?
I’ve found that having a kid made me more honest about what I eat–I’m conscious of the example I’m setting for him, so I resist grabbing that extra chocolate chip cookie just because it’s there. (On the other hand, sometimes I’ll sneak that cookie into my office and eat it when junior’s not looking!) And because he’s so picky, my husband and I both eat a wide variety of foods with international flavors in front of him, plus loads of fruits and vegetables. We’ve taken him to Indian restaurants where he’s eaten nothing but rice, naan, and mango lassi, taquerias where he’s munched on chips and some chicken breast wrapped in a corn tortilla, and Chinese dumpling joints where he’s ordered plain noodles in broth. Each exposure he has to a particular food, whether or not he tastes it, brings him that much closer to eating it himself. We don’t try to convince him, and we don’t talk about any food as “bad” or off-limits, just as something to be eaten less often. So I guess my advice would be to be conscious of what you’re eating, but try not to let it show! The more relaxed you can be around food, the more enjoyable meals will be.
About Debbie
Debbie Koenig is a writer specializing in food, parenting, and health & nutrition, and the author of the cookbook Parents Need to Eat Too: Nap-Friendly Recipes, One-Handed Meals & Time-Saving Kitchen Tricks for New Parents (William Morrow, 2012).
She’s written for such publications as Parents, American Baby, Weight Watchers, Fit Pregnancy, and The New York Times, and also writes two blogs: Parents Need to Eat Too, which you’re reading right now, features unpretentious yet sophisticated recipes that please adults and developing eaters; Feed the Parents, which she writes for Weight Watchers, focuses on healthy cooking—and healthful attitudes—for busy families. A Lifetime Member, Koenig lost 100 pounds more than 15 years ago.
In her cookbook, blogs, and freelance work, Koenig has developed hundreds of recipes for the family market, all featuring whole foods with minimal processing or artificial ingredients, and all without being preachy. With warmth and humor, she encourages parents to do their best, and to celebrate life’s imperfections—which for her includes raising one of the pickiest eaters on the planet. Koenig live in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband and their growing-like-a-string-bean son.