Nutritious additions – healthy things to add to food – Food For Kids Podcast episode 68

Joanne Roach (00:13)

Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. This episode is going to be a practical one and full of suggestions for small ways that you can pack in a little extra goodness to foods that you already eat.

Over the last week we talked to Maeve Hanan about why we shouldn't hyperfixate on the label or category that any individual food or meal fits into, but instead we should zoom out to the overall picture of the variety and benefits of foods that we're eating across a week or a month of meals.And coming up, we have an episode with a gastroenterology dietitian who will also talk about why diversity is good for our guts. So between the two, I thought we could fit in some actual ideas for how to increase that diversity and get some more whole foods, fibre and nutrients into the kinds of meals that our family already eat and our children already accept. That way we can accept that in modern life we're going to eat some processed foods sometimes, but this is about finding small and practical ways that we can pack in lots of things our bodies need alongside or in between those foods so that we can increase our diversity of plants and whole foods without becoming too narrow or obsessive about it.

Because I don't want the episode to run long by having to address individual dietary needs for every suggestion, I'm going to on this one assume that you will discount anything that won't work either because of allergies or feeding patterns in your house This will be a list of some ideas to scribble onto a maybe list and loads of them won't apply to you, but maybe some of them will.

First up is things you can use to boost an Italian style meal, so pizza or pasta.

Of course you can always add a salad to the table, but if your child isn't tempted by scoops of mixed salad, consider having some of the items separated, so you can have your bowl of dressed leaves, but then also have a bowl of cucumber chunks or tomato pieces or bits of chopped pepper or grated carrot and then think of salad toppers like pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, olives, croutons and crunchy breadcrumbs. Think about the Pizza Hut salad bar and how people will often add things into their bowl full of salad there that they wouldn't necessarily put on at home. So put some of those items on your table in bowls so that kids can make their own version. Helping themselves gives them autonomy and choice and it gives you a chance to model how you like adding things to your plate too. Don't forget to have a dressing available for leafy salads. Some of the vitamins in leafy greens are fat soluble, so we absorb them better with a little fat, although there will probably be other fats in the meal, so don't worry if your child doesn't like the dressing, it's just nice to have it available.

For the pizza itself, you can also obviously put extra toppings onto the pizza if your kids will go for that. You might find they're more accepting if they get to place the toppings on the pizza themselves, and for little kids, they might enjoy making a face with pieces of veg.

For pasta meals you can boost the sauce by adding up to about 40-50 % of blended cooked vegetables like carrots or squash into red pasta sauces or smoothly blended white beans or tofu into creamy sauces. This works particularly well for the white sauce inside a lasagna if you make your own because it's all blended together with other flavours anyway. I talked about these sauce extras in a lot more detail in episode 42, so I'll link to that in the show notes. You can obviously also try different pastas if you like, or mix whole grain or pea protein or chicken pasta in with the regular pasta, although there is a lot of goodness in regular pasta too. Petit pois size peas and canned corn seem to be the veggies which a lot of people will accept in pasta sauce without blending them. And of course you can always have veggies on the side in dishes for people to help themselves to.

If you use croutons, don't forget that you can make your own and shove them in the freezer. If you have leftover bread going stale, just spray with a little oil and any seasonings you like and bake or air fry and then freeze until you need them. For breadcrumbs you can use up wholemeal bread as well as white bread, so just blitz it in a blender and freeze it and then you can grab a handful when you need it and give it a quick toss in a pan with some flavourings to sprinkle on top. I tend to use bit of garlic powder, salt and pepper and some oregano if it's an Italian topper. And can also grate in some parmesan or strong cheddar if you like.

I'll also link to a plant-based parmesan substitute that we use all the time in our house even though we do also eat parmesan. We just like this one a lot. It's a blend of cashew nuts, nutritional yeast, garlic powder, and a little salt and it adds a brilliant punch of flavour and nutrition sprinkled on top almost anything Italian or that just needs a bit of savoury crunch.

If you're in a plant-based house, you'll probably already have nutritional yeast, but if you don't know what it is, it's something I'm going to suggest here that you consider trying out because it can add a lot of flavour and nutrition to a lot of family favourites. You can get it in large supermarkets now, not just in health food shops. It comes in tubs that look a bit like big gravy containers and it's flakes that look a bit like fish food. Don't be put off, it doesn't taste like fish food at all. Nutritional yeast is made from the same group of yeast that we use to make beer and so on, but unlike in beer, it's not active, so you don't get any yeasty bloating or any other action going on. It has loads of protein and fibre, and most of the ones that you can buy here are fortified with B vitamins too. If you just dip your finger into it and try it, you'll see it has a kind of a slightly old cheddar sort of tang to it. But when you add it into things, it can add this savoury, umami, cheesyish sort of flavour and it can either enhance or replace some cheese in lots of meals. Add it to cheese sauce and if you want you can reduce the cheese a little or just add it in on top. Add a couple of spoons into almost any sauce and it will enhance the depth of it. Creamy sauces with pasta hold it really well. The sprinkle that I mentioned above that you can use as a substitute for parmesan tastes a bit like the flavouring in cheese and onion crisps. I'll link to that recipe in the show notes. You can add a teaspoon of nutritional yeast into baked bean sauce, mac and cheese, pizza sauce, soups, stews, anything and it will just add some depth and about three grams of protein per tablespoon depending on the brand for just that one spoon. I'm not an ambassador for it or anything by the way! I just found it when I was exploring plant-based foods and it's such a good addition to a lot of things and my daughter who is an absolute cheese fiend now adds it into loads of her food too.

If you're having burritos or wraps or pitas or fajitas or any of those kind of "food in a flatbread" kind of meals, then consider having them self-assembly and that way you can add more variety of items to choose from on the table. Experiment with whole grain or 50-50 breads. If it's self assembly, you could have a pack of each type on the table and then freeze the other half for the next time. So those who don't mind whole grain can model that without it being forced on the people who still prefer white.

If you're making up burritos or tacos for people to eat, consider adding a spread of refried bean style spread on one side of the bread. It's a tasty but inoffensive way to get some beans into a meal. And you can do a really thin spread for kids who aren't very beany yet or if it's in a pot on the table to choose, kids may choose a tiny little bit to put on theirs.

Guacamole is already a brilliant food, but if you want to, can bump up shop-bought guacamole even more by blending in some pulses. Tinned garden peas and canned broad beans are cheap and work well in guacamole or frozen edamame cooked for a few minutes to soften works too. Get the texture nice and smooth so it still does that creamy job that it's made for. That's really good on toast, or if it's going on the table as a topping, you could add beans to half of it and leave half of it as a regular guac. You can also do this trick with hummus. Hummus is super nutritious and full of pulsey tahini goodness already. But if it's popular in your house, you can try adding things to it and then re-blend them to bulk it out. If that's something you'd like to try extra tinned beans, nut butters, beetroot, cooked carrot or squash, jarred red peppers are all things you can add into hummus for a change.

When it comes to chocolatey things, you can add avocado to chocolate mousse or make a mousse from avocados with cocoa or you can blend avocado or just add cocoa powder into chocolate milks. Also consider adding a small amount of melted dark chocolate or cocoa powder into lots of chocolate flavoured favourites. Both contain good plant compounds and fibre and you can pitch them openly to your kids as that you're making something even more chocolatey.

If you like to bake with packet cake mixes, you can add fruit and veg in pureed forms to quite a lot of those mixes. Just Google them and you can bet your bottom dollar that someone in America will have figured out the ratios already. You can also add pureed fruit and starchy veg to most pancake batters. So make your batter and make up some plain pancakes then add some of the flavouring into the rest of the batch and cook the rest so that everybody has a choice between plain or bumped up.

If you want to get more seeds in, but you find them difficult to get accepted in your house, then you can also add ground flax to quite a lot of baking mixes, pancakes and cakes in place of eggs. Eggs are obviously good for you too, but you can swap out one of the eggs for what plant-based eaters call a flax egg, so you're getting some more variety into the mix. Just Google a flax egg. It's basically a spoon of ground flax left for a few minutes in water to swell up and you can't taste it at all.

If you like shop bought sauces for pasta or curry, add in vegetables or pulses to those and blend them if needed. If you use tin meats in sauce to make pies, you can add in some tinned lentils and this also works if you make a bolognese too. Sub up to 50 % of the mince with lentils, build it up over time from just like 10 % until everybody gets used to it.

If you're trying to get more probiotic dairy into your children, if your kids like milkshakes, consider adding a spoon or two of probiotic yogurt to them, either just regular natural yogurt or one of the drinking yogurts. Build up from a small amount and if you think they would find the sour taste of a plain yoghurt off putting, then use a similar flavoured probiotic yoghurt to the one that's in their milkshake.

And while we're on creamy things, if your family eats a lot of mayo based things like coleslaw or potato salad, you can mix the creamy dressing as half mayo and half natural yogurt, or again, build the yogurt up from 10 or 20 percent as that lightens it up a bit and adds in some good bacteria without losing that mayonnaise creaminess. It's much more creamy and familiar than just using yogurt on its own. If you like sour cream on some of your meals, try mixing natural yogurt with a splash of lemon juice or cider vinegar and leaving it for a few minutes. And that will usually do the same job on something like a jacket potato or a taco, but with those yoghurt benefits thrown in.

While we're still on dairy type vibes, if you have meals with either cheese sauces or cream cheese in them, you can add in some blended tofu to those. Silken tofu is actually soft enough to be mashed into cream cheese without having to blend, but even firm tofu will blend up nicely. Tofu ricotta is a vegan alternative to thick cheese sauces in things like lasagnas and pastas. But if you still eat dairy, there's nothing to stop you adding some tofu ricotta in and then mixing it to add more variety. It's another way to get some beans into a meal without actually changing the overall meal. Tofu also blends well into smoothies and desserts and it's a really great plant protein if your child struggles with the texture of meat and you want to bump up their protein.

If you have a goal to include more whole grains, but you know that switching to brown rice or quinoa would not fly in your house, you can now buy microwave packs of all kinds of whole grains in the supermarkets for about a quid. They're in like one or two person portions. So you can make your regular white rice and then just add in one pack of something different to try. So there'll only be a little bit through the rice. Or again, you can have both on the table, have your bowl of white rice and then have your different grain on the side and you can model adding a big spoon of quinoa or wild rice or whatever into your basmati. White rice is of course still a very nutritious food, but this is a way to explore different grains without having to have them as the only option on the plate.

For adding in extras to snacks. Think about having either a tiny dipping pot of something like nut butter or a spread like hummus available on the plate if you've got things to dip in Berries available in the middle of the table during breakfast or snacks will often get picked at until they're gone. And this also applies to satsuma pieces that have been peeled or grapes. They often disappear from a share plate without actually needing to be officially in the meal or snack. Leftovers can also just be popped into a little pot into a lunchbox for later.

And while we're on snacks, some other nutritious additions to snack plates are handfuls of nuts, pumpkin or sunflower seeds, whole wheat crackers with a dip, roasted chickpeas or peas, which you can buy in snack packs now, trail mix and add some dark chocolate chips thrown in. And don't forget dried fruits as well as crudités type things on the plate. Just a couple of pieces of cucumber or carrot sticks or a couple of pepper strips, a celery stick or an apple slice just alongside other things.

And finally, the crudités and dip thing can be a genuinely brilliant way to get some goodness in before a meal starts. If the meal's a family favourite that the kids will be unhappy if you swap out any elements of them, then try having some chopped veggies and a dip or two on the table between asking them to come to the table to eat and the food being totally ready to plate up. It's a great way to get the things that you would have added onto the side of the meal in before the meal comes. Same if you're eating pizza with a movie. Put some crudités with or without dips out while you start watching and while you're waiting for the pizzas to cook in the oven. And then when the pizzas come out, everyone can just have their slices. Your body doesn't care whether the food is served on the same plate at the same time. It's just happy to receive the variety when it turns up.

I hope these suggestions are helpful. Lots of them will absolutely not apply to your family's age and stage, so just make a note of one that you can try out and give it a go next time you eat that meal. It's these small incremental changes that stick and then build up over time that actually make the difference rather than some big sweeping change that just isn't sustainable. It's all about finding small ways to put in extra choice and goodness rather than focusing on taking things away. And in the meantime, all of your family's bodies will thank you for adding in tiny bits of variety here and there to feed your guts too.

Speaking of feeding our guts, there's so much media around now about gut bacteria and the microbiome and probiotics and all of that. So on the next episode, I'll be talking to a dietitian who works in gastroenterology at Great Ormond Street about how the gut microbiome works in children and how we can help them to build theirs as best we can while they're still growing up. So I hope to see you on that one. And in the meantime, happy eating.

00:00 Introduction

01:44 Nutritious additions ideas

13:47 Summary and outro