Eating out regularly can help to stimulate children’s interest in food. Many parents are put off by the fear that their children will create an embarrassing noise and mess, but if kids are introduced to eating out early on they soon adapt to the different environment. Though they are only four, I regularly take Ellie and Lydia to Chinatown in London for dim sum or to Brick Lane for Indian food. Ethnic restaurants tend to have a friendlier, less stuffy approach to children, which means that everyone can relax. We order lots of small dishes and, though the girls certainly won’t eat everything, they don’t feel under any pressure so they tend to be more adventurous than usual. Eating ‘tapas style’ allows kids to experience a wide variety of different flavours at the same time and this is not something that can be easily recreated at home.
Another advantage of ethnic restaurants is that children are expected to eat the same food as adults. Going to a restaurant and ordering proper food for yourself and a ‘children’s menu’ of cheap sausages and chips for the kids totally defeats the purpose of taking them to a restaurant in the first place. Separating children’s food from adults’ can only add to the problem if you are trying to educate them to eat properly. For so many small children, dinner is something served in a plastic bowl at 6pm while their parents try and get on with something else. It’s no wonder that they fail to see it as an enjoyable social occasion. It is difficult for many families to eat together during the week because of early bedtimes and long working hours but at least we can try and redress the balance at weekends.
I believe that children do prefer to eat good food but a lot of them just don’t get the opportunity. Providing home-cooked meals for them is one way of making sure that they do. Cooking fresh ingredients is more labour-intensive than relying on convenience food but it is also more nutritious, more satisfying and less expensive (think of the price of a carrot compared to the price of a jar of carrot purée). The long-term gain is that the whole family becomes healthier and more adventurous in its tastes.
The recipes in this book are basically classic dishes or adaptations that I feel would be suitable for adults and children to enjoy together. On the whole they are very simple to make, because there’s no point spending an inordinate amount of time cooking something that your two-year-old might hate. Because children have such different tastes, they won’t like all the recipes, but persevere and they may well surprise you. When we took the kids to the London restaurant, St John, to meet Fergus Henderson, who had cooked up a big plate of pig’s tails, I could never have guessed that Ellie and Lydia would tuck in with such gusto.
I hope this book will encourage parents to make fresh food for their children. Sure, you can go out and buy a bottle of lemonade but making it yourself is easy, infinitely healthier and tastes of what it is supposed to taste of – fresh lemons. That’s really what this book is all about.
Because I love food I actually enjoy shopping, though I am the first to confess that I am not usually pushing a trolley full of nappies and cornflakes. I like to go to Covent Garden market every Tuesday morning at 5am to find out what’s available. Interestingly, I have only ever bumped into one other chef there, though if you believe the press the place should be crawling with them. Many chefs rely on their suppliers to bring new foods to them but I find that wandering around myself keeps me in touch and also gives me fresh ideas about what to cook. If I invite people to dinner, they are often surprised when they ask me what I am cooking and I say that I don’t know because I haven’t been shopping yet. But if I try and plan dishes in advance I often can’t find one of the key ingredients anyway, so I like to keep an open mind. If I find a good main ingredient I can usually match the rest of the meal around it with what’s available. In the same way, I quite often find myself creating dishes with what’s left in my fridge at home. Lots of well-known dishes have been invented in this way – for example, Caesar salad. Who would ever think of matching anchovies, Parmesan, garlic, romaine lettuce and croutons? That’s what Caesar Cardini did when guests turned up at his hotel unexpectedly and he had nothing to feed them.
Though supermarkets nowadays are ahead of the game, unfortunately they are often ahead of the seasons, too. I find it sad that, just as we are all becoming more sophisticated about food, our awareness of the seasons is being destroyed. Supermarkets aim to supply everything all the time, regardless of where it comes from, what the season is, whether it is ripe, and, most important of all, whether it has any flavour. Yes, in theory, it’s great to be able to cook with anything you like all year round, but what’s the point if it doesn’t taste of much? Certain foods are only worth eating in season, such as tomatoes and berries. As a child, I used to look forward to the appearance of my grandfather’s first strawberries in June, but now that we can eat imported ones all year round – greenhouse-grown and tasteless – the magic has gone. So although I envy kids today the huge variety of food they can pick and choose from, at the same time I worry that everything is beginning to taste like everything else – is it any wonder they get bored?
I want to keep alive for my children the tastes and scents of the food that I enjoyed as a child and I believe the best way to do this is to buy seasonally. When it comes to organic food, I have yet to be convinced that it always tastes better. Some organic produce has a superb flavour – chicken, eggs and carrots are obvious examples – but too much of what’s available consists of disappointing and expensive foreign imports. The best way to buy organic is to subscribe to a box scheme, where organic produce is delivered to your door. In this way you can be sure that what you’re getting is fresh and locally produced, and prices will be more reasonable because you are buying direct from the producer. Farmers’ markets can be good sources of organic food, too.
In terms of health, organic food is undoubtedly a better choice for children, since it is grown without the use of pesticides, and animals are raised without routine antibiotics and growth promoters. Although ‘safe’ levels of toxins have been established (but not always adhered to), these are based on adult intake. Children have less body mass and so consume a proportionally higher amount – particularly babies, for whom fruit and vegetables are a major source of nutrition. At the same time, their immature immune systems are less able to cope with toxins in their diet. As a parent I worry about the potential effect on my children’s health of modern farming methods but I’m also concerned about the lack of diversity. Supermarket demands for uniform produce with a long shelf life have resulted in the loss of hundreds of varieties of fruits and vegetables. The quest for cheap meat has led to the loss of traditional breeds and an intensive farming system that has become tainted by disease – even eggs are no longer considered a safe food for our children. Supermarkets now package food with ‘grown for flavour’ on the labels because so much produce tastes of nothing. Surely beyond ‘eating to live’, the whole point of food is flavour, and the best way to achieve this is to go back to more natural farming methods.
At school, when it came to the crunch at the end of the fifth form, I was completely clueless about what to do with my life. All my mates became golf pros and if I had been serious enough about it I could have followed them. I had a seven handicap by the time I was 15 and played three times every weekend and as often as I could during the week.
In our last year at school we had to choose between metalwork and domestic science. I couldn’t see the point in filing away at a bit of metal for weeks to end up with a key ring, so I opted for