Joanne Roach (00:14)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today's episode is part of our series on how to get kids to eat more of something and today it's the turn of pulses or legumes, so beans, lentils and peas. I don't think I need to explain in too much detail why it's great to help kids to like legumes. Briefly, beans, peas and lentils are brilliant foods, packed with protein and fibre, and lots of vitamins and minerals including iron, potassium, phosphorus, manganese, magnesium, folate and zinc.
They do double duty as a source of protein and one of your five a day and they are brilliant for our gut microbiome. Populations who eat more pulses tend to live longer and have better health outcomes and in the UK most of us don't eat enough of them.
And if that's not enough, they are cheap as anything. And because they don't require a lot of inputs, they're generally better for the environment than most other protein sources.
This episode is intended to be more practical, so I'm not going to go into too much detail about why they're great. But if you want to know more, I'll link in the show notes to the Food Foundation's Guide to Beans and why they are so good for us and to their campaign to get us all to bang in more beans.
OK, so you want to have more pulses in your family's food, but how to get your child to accept them? As with our other episodes on this idea, we're not actually aiming to get our kids to do anything. What we're doing instead is to give children opportunities to build their familiarity with the food and then try it when they feel comfortable, or building foods into or alongside familiar foods so that they feel comfortable to eat them.
In this episode I'm going to give you some suggestions of dishes where the beans or lentils are obvious to see and taste and some where they are mixed or blended in so their texture might be easier to cope with for some children. But as usual, even when we are mixing things in together, the idea is not to hide them and pretend they're not there. If asked, you can always tell the truth or even allow them to help to prep them. Hiding and sneaking only builds distrust over time. But there's nothing wrong with blending or mixing things in to make foods easier to approach and their textures easier and just be honest if asked.
So let's get started with some different ways to get more beans, lentils and peas into your family's food.
First of all, let's look at beans, including the plainer white beans like cannellini and haricot that we use in baked beans, and then the fatter pithier ones like broad beans and butter beans, and the darker beanier tasting ones like kidney beans and black beans. I'll also include some chickpea ideas here, and most beans can use the same ideas.
So first for those meals where the beans are not blended or disguised in any way. They are in there mixed with everything else, but in some family-friendly meals. For all the meals I mention, I'll link to some examples in the show notes. And for anything mentioning meat, you can always substitute a veggie mince instead if you're plant-based. Obviously the Great British staple when it comes to beans is tin baked beans. Most kids do accept them at some point in their childhood and they are cheap and delicious.
Don't overlook them as a source of beans. Some beans and cheese on some decent toast is a great balanced meal. But if you use that idea of a wet red sauce and beans as a basis, there are lots of directions to go to to try different beans and different presentations.
One of the recipes doing the viral rounds on social media recently has been called pizza beans. This just means it's the same ingredients as on a pizza, but in a beany dish and instead of a pizza base you're dipping crusty bread or garlic bread in to scoop it up. Most pizza bean recipes include tinned white beans, tomato sauce or a jar of pizza sauce, some cheese all over the top and if you like some pepperoni or any toppings your child likes on their pizza. You literally mix everything together, put the cheese on top and bang it in the oven until it's heated through and the cheese is melted. This is a good one for helping kids to explore beans because you can start off with more tomato sauce and less beans and build up over time if they're hesitant. A similar but more traditional one pot recipe is cowboy beans which is a camp stove favourite and includes sausages, onions, beans and tomato sauce. I've seen versions with cooked new potato pieces lobbed in or cooked beef or mince and lots of the versions have barbecue sauce in too but the easiest starter versions literally mixed baked beans with some cooked sausages and add bread to dip.
Chilli is obviously a great way to include beans. If your child likes slightly spicy chilli, then adding in any kind of bean alongside the mince and veg is a great plan. Brilliant on rice, on a jacket potato, with some chips or in a burrito. Start with small amounts of beans so they don't have a bean in every single bite and build up over time. Or if they prefer not to have them mixed through, then have some cooked beans in a dish on the table and model adding some to your chilli. If they like a little spice then chilli mac and cheese is another great one and it's an easy one pot dish that uses favourites of pasta and cheese.
So that's the one pot favourites. Now for some Mexican staples that a lot of kids recognise and love. If your child likes tacos, you can mix some tinned black beans in with the mince in the taco meat. And if you tend to serve tacos as a middle of the table, build your own adventure kind of meal, then you can have those as a choice. There are loads of nice recipes for black beans on their own in a sauce, but my kids always liked adding them when they were mixed with sweet corn and red onion to make a little salsa.
The same thing applies to nachos. If you make a tray of nachos, you can have some areas of the tray with beans mixed in with the sauce and some without, or have a corn and bean salsa to add cold when you add the things like sour cream or guac just before serving.
Quesadillas and burritos work really well to mix beans in with other fillings too, as everything is squashed together. If your child doesn't like mixed meals at the moment then letting them build their own or having the taco version might work easier. But if they can cope with things mixed together, quesadillas are lovely for getting that melty inside with the crispy outside. So see if your child will agree to adding a few beans in the middle. For any of these Mexican meals, if your child tends to pick out whole beans because of the texture, consider using refried beans. These have a blended soft texture and can be spread onto the wrap or taco or dolloped in with other toppings on a nacho. If you get the canned ones, be sure to stir it well and warm it through and you can always add a little water to make it thinner and more dollopable, if that's a word. But you can also make absolutely delicious refried beans at home too and I'll link to a recipe.
They're lovely splattered onto the nachos, spread on one side of a taco shell or lining a wrap for quesadilla or burrito. In particular, refried beans spread across a wrap and then covered in grated cheese before folding and pan cooking as a mini quesadilla can be brilliant for kids who like soft and fairly plain quesadillas.
In traditional European cookery, beans tend to turn up more in soups and stews. For example, you can add a tin of beans or some frozen peas into a minestrone if your child doesn't mind lumpy soups. Or you can add beans or peas in with a lamb stew or red kidney beans in with a chilli con carne. French and Italian bean recipes tend to feature the bean much more obviously, with the beans being the star, either in a tomatoey sauce or in a lighter sauce with a lemony twist or lots of herbs.
North African and Middle Eastern food also uses lots of beans, but they also use a lot of chickpeas too. You can find a lot of delicious recipes for chickpeas that really feature the chickpeas upfront, but also there's loads of ways to blend and mash them into other things, which I'll talk about in a minute.
If you think your child would respond to trying out foods from other cultures, or they've got used to beans over time and can handle something a bit more bean-forward, then Google some Italian, French, Spanish, Moroccan, Turkish, Palestinian or Syrian bean recipes together. They might find something fun to explore.
But for a lot of children who aren't yet used to these bean forward recipes can be a bit too much in your face at first. So I won't go into lots of details of them here. I will link to some ideas in the show notes though.
OK, so we've covered some ways to present beans in obvious ways. So let's look at some ways to add beans, lentils or chickpeas into anything mixed that your child already likes. So, for example, you can add some lentils to mince meals like bolognese, shepherd's or cottage pie, lasagna and also into meatballs and meatloaf. Lentils work particularly well for this. Small green or brown lentils have a bit of a chew, and so they work great alongside mince or TVP mince because the chew is similar to the mince chew.
You can start with just substituting a quarter of the mince with lentils and build up to a half over time. Some of those recipes can even be all lentils or beans instead of mince altogether. Lentil meatballs are great and there's loads of recipes for lentil meatloaf too and both of them freeze well in portions. Similarly, burgers, risoles and fritters work great with beans and lentils. Substitute some of the meat for beans or lentils or make entirely veggie bean burgers.
Chickpeas work great in fritters and if you're some tinned sweet corn if your child likes it, then those corn pieces will be chewy enough to distract from the unfamiliar chickpea texture in the fritter. Other things to add alongside chickpeas in burgers, sauces and fillings are other chewy or squeaky textures. So as well as the corn, there's things like halloumi or chewy bacon that works great, or shredded chicken or tuna. All of these provide a mix of textures which makes the beany texture harder to pick out. Lentils are so varied that they can be used for all sorts of things. Brown and green ones remain whole usually unless you intentionally overcook them to soft, so this means that they can provide that bite and squeak in lots of things.
A popular veggie taco mince is made from finely chopped walnuts and cooked green lentils because the two together provide a good mix of bite and chew. They're also brilliant to cook on a sheet pan with some nice flavours sprinkled on top until they're crispy and a little dried out and you can eat them as a snack or sprinkle them onto things. Think about having a bowl of crispy lentils on the table for everyone to add to their salad for example. They're quite moreish as a finger snack.
And course lentils really shine in curries and dahl is a staple of Asian cooking. You can make it as thick or as thin as you like. So it's great to have as a side dish to choose from in a family style curry meal or thinned down into a soupier texture to dip bread in for a lunch. Chickpeas are also great in curries. And even if your child would never eat a curry made entirely out of chickpeas, if you have a family style curry night, consider making chana masala, which is a tomato and chickpea curry, as a side dish for people to model adding to their plate with other things.
So we've covered a bunch of ways that beans and lentils can be used fairly whole in the food, but there are loads of other ways to mix them in more seamlessly too. Red lentils are a special case for this because they fall apart when cooked and so can be blended into almost anything. Add a handful of red lentils into almost any soup or stew and they will just thicken it up. They work particularly well in things like carrot or sweet potato soup or a red Thai curry soup or sauce where they just thicken everything beautifully and add loads of fibre and protein. Just add a little extra liquid to give them something to absorb. You can also add them into homemade red pasta sauces as you cook them or even to shop bought sauce, just add a little extra liquid and cook until they collapse and you can blend them in.
A simple tomato sauce with blended red lentils and lots of melted cheese is a child friendly and delicious thing. And while we're on pasta sauces, another way to blend in pulses is to add white beans into a creamy sauce and blend either a homemade alfredo or a mac and cheese sauce or blend a tin of white beans into a jar of shop bought white sauce for pasta or lasagna.
If your child likes thick smoothies and shakes, you can also add a handful of white beans to those and blend them up. And while we are talking about whole beans in this episode, don't forget that you can also do the same with tofu, which is made from the milk of soybeans and has a lot of the same benefits and it blends brilliantly into soups, sauces and smoothies.
This ability to blend to a paste also makes lentils and beans great for adding to lots of baking. Red lentils are great to make into a pancake batter, either on its own or mixed with flour for a blander taste. Blended beans and chickpeas can be used in lot of sweet recipes. I'll link to some recipes for black bean brownies, chickpea blondies and energy balls, all of which have no beany flavour at all, but just provide some structure and fibre to the mix. You can also add them to bread rolls or bread mixes.
And of course, beans and chickpeas are famous for making hummus and other great spreads. If your child likes dipping, this is a really great place to start. You can make hummus with more or less any pulse. And you can also make interesting variations of hummus, for example, adding something sweet like carrots or something colourful like beetroot. I'll link to some ideas. It's a great way to get some pulses in as a snack after school or before dinner starts while they're hungry. And hummus and dips are also great spread on their sandwiches and wraps for packed lunches.
I haven't really mentioned peas much here because we don't often think of them when we're thinking about pulses, but the humble pea has so much going for it. Peas grow well here in this climate. They are frozen or canned on the day of picking, so store cupboard peas are delicious and nutritious and they are sweet and child friendly.
If your child's getting used to peas, consider spending the extra few pence to have petit pois at first because the texture is generally easier to start with and they're usually a bit sweeter. If you buy fresh peas to have fun podding them, try to get them really fresh and eat them on the same day start to turn to starch after picking, so if they sit around for days, they will be less sweet than the frozen ones which are frozen straight away. But they are fun to pod together.
And while we're talking about podding, I've mentioned in some of my seasonal food episodes that it's great fun to pod broad beans too, but children often find them easier to accept if you double pod them, meaning if you briefly boil them and then slip off the thick white skins and just eat the bright green middles. These also make brilliant hummus, dips and spreads and so do peas. You can even make pesto with them and I linked to an example in the episode of suggested May seasonal meals. So that's a quick run through of suggestions for peas, beans, lentils and chickpeas.
I hope some of these ideas are new to you and you might feel like you can give at least one of them a go. Don't forget that the best way to help your child to accept legumes like any other food is to get your child on board and keep presenting opportunities to build their familiarity without any pressure.
You can let them find them in the shops, pick out different ones to try from the cans aisle and find recipes for them online, including those fun baking sweet recipes. You can let them play with some of them dried or cooked. They are so cheap, they're affordable to have fun with a handful or two. And when you're preparing the dried ones to cook, they can help to pick out the ones to discard any damaged or discoloured ones so they know they're eating the best ones.
And finally a bit of a cheat if your child isn't yet ready to accept them on their plate is to explore the pastas that are made with pulses. There are chickpea and lentil ones which are really quite good and can be mixed in with regular pasta too while your child's building up their familiarity and confidence.
And obviously model eating pulses yourself, trying new things and learning new recipes. Your being uncertain about something but adventurous anyway is a really good thing for your child to see.
I'll link to a bunch of recipes in the show notes for ways to try these ideas out and I hope you'll find one recipe idea to try this week to bring some legumes into your family food. Do let me know if you have a favourite child-friendly legume recipe or if you try any of these.
I'll be back next time with another episode, so I hope to see you then. And in the meantime, happy beanie eating!
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