How to Eat (76 page)

LIVER

SMOKED SALMON

FROZEN PEAS

Liver is another food that everyone presumes children will have to be forced to eat against their will. I never found this, but it may be that I am irredeemably extravagant because I fed my children calves’ liver and carefully de-biled chicken livers rather than the vile, fibrous, bitter livers I was given at school. People who would never think of asking how much something costs before they eat it themselves get twitchy about expensive tastes in their young. Whenever I gave my children smoked salmon I was mocked by friends, as if I was making them wear tutus and speak French to one another in the manner of that rich-kid stunt in
High Society.
But children love smoked salmon, which is a very useful meal to bear in mind for hungry, fractious children kept waiting for an inevitably late lunch by an equally fractious parent after a Saturday morning spent shopping at the supermarket. After all, it’s bad enough having to take the food out of the car into the house and then out of the bags into the cupboards. To have to cook any of it would be the final straw. Cut open instead a plastic-wrapped package of smoked salmon, butter some bread, if you must, and grate a few carrots, if you can. (It’s worth knowing, in this regard, that most children seem to like frozen peas, as they are, unthawed, to eat from their own little bowls set out in front of them. It’s not wise to let very small children eat these chokingly unyielding vegetable beads, but vigilance is a better route than dietary censorship.)

Giving children real food, the sort of food we’d eat ourselves, is important. It’s why the French eat well, and the Italians: their children are not fobbed off with lesser ingredients and different meals in the erroneous belief that good food or expensive items are wasted on them. I’m not saying that you must bankrupt yourself to provide your angels with luxuries and
bonnes bouches,
but simply that they should not eat worse than you do. If I grate fresh Parmesan onto my pasta, why should I insist that theirs come ready-grated, bitterly musty, smelling of old socks and trapped in a plastic-lidded drum?

This does not mean that everything your child eats you will want to eat. One of my infant son’s favorite meals was chicken liver puréed with soaked dried apricots. I should not choose to lunch on that. But I added the dried apricots to counter the potentially constipating effects of the liver. Deep within me I must have a fixation with digestive habits; I always feel that the balance between what nannies always used to refer to as the “binding” and “loosening” effects of foods has to be maintained. For example, I serve poached egg for supper on top of a bowl of corn.

CHICKEN LIVER

DRIED APRICOTS

I threw together the apricots and liver in the first place to use up a liver from a chicken I was roasting; real cooking, I can’t help feeling, always starts from leftovers. Thus I concocted the following recipe—I say recipe, but it isn’t really anything as precise. For a start, quantities are hard to gauge at any time, but for children, whose ages and appetites vary, it’s even harder. But when my son was seven months old, I’d make up a batch of this and figure it would make 2–3 portions for him. You need a chicken liver (about 2 ounces), which you fry gently in butter, and purée made from dried apricots. I figure about 1 tablespoon of purée per liver. Just soak some dried apricots in hot water from a just-boiled kettleful for an hour or so, then boil till soft, drain, and purée. Most apricots are labeled as not needing any soaking, but I figure they do. Take a slice of dry or stale bread and soak it in some milk until saturated. Squeeze it out and add it to the liver and apricots and blend. Chicken liver, fried in butter as above, and blended with an equal weight of chicken breast poached in milk is another idea; use as much of the poaching liquid as you need to get to the texture you want. If you leave it thick, you can spread it onto toast-and-butter fingers. When I wanted the puréed liver as a bowl-bound meal—with or without baby pasta—I sometimes stirred in some puréed carrot, too.

QUICK MEALS

What helps most is having a cache of food you can throw together easily. So you must get stocked up first. You don’t need me to tell you to keep a constant supply of canned tuna (which I detest) in the house, but I remind you simply because this is a good way to give children something sustaining to eat. I know people go on about added salt and sugar to canned foods children like, but I can’t get worked up about it. It makes sense to watch for salt when they’re tiny. I never salted any cooking water—of pasta, vegetables, anything—or added salt later, until my children were four years and eighteen months respectively. Then I decided that, if I wanted them to eat like us, it was inconsistent to refuse to allow them to season their food like us.

BEANS AND OTHER LEGUMES

BACON

SHRIMP

TUNA

PINK FISH AND BEANS

SMOKED MACKEREL

Children seem to like all legumes. Canned chickpeas, cannellini, pinto, any bean you want, are worth keeping around for them, and if you do mind about salt, then buy canned organic ones without salt added. Just stir some cooked chopped bacon into any of them or some shrimp or fish into the cannellini. Shrimp and beans happens to be an actual contemporary Italian reworking
—i ricchi e i poveri
as it’s known—of the traditional
tonno e fagioli;
indeed, tuna, drained, mixed in with a can of beans, and bound with a few drops of good olive oil is another meal worth bearing in mind, as canned tuna seems ideally suited to childish palates. Trout fillets, just poached, then roughly chopped and added to cannellini—or Pink Fish and Beans—are a particular favorite in my household, as my daughter is going through a deeply pink stage that shows no signs of abating. You could use smoked fillets if you want to avoid any cooking whatsoever, or substitute smoked mackerel; this is something of a radical substitution—the taste is much stronger, the texture much oilier—but can be successful.

PASTA

EGG NOODLES

VAGUELY JAPANESE SOUP

Pasta is another obvious staple, as are Asian noodles. I live near a Thai shop, so buy bagfuls of fettucine-thick, egg-yellow-and-paler thread-thin noodles (which need a minute’s cooking) and fresh rice sticks, which don’t need to be cooked at all—you just steep them for 5–10 minutes in boiling water. (It doesn’t hurt to keep some cooked, cold-water-spritzed, and drained egg noodles in a covered bowl in the fridge, either.) Any of these, with some soy sauce (as I say, I’m not salt-sensitive) lightly sprinkled over, are among the lowest-effort meals I can think of. Supermarkets sell various forms of Asian noodles now, so you don’t need access to exotically stocked, stall-sized shops, shelves piled with dried shrimp and sour pastes. But going to specialty stores makes shopping so pleasurable, and it’s cheaper. Sometimes I make small bowls of vaguely Japanese soup: stock, some chopped greens, manageable lengths of noodle. This, for my daughter, signals special food, partly because it’s food I make for myself (see pages 382–384) and partly because it has seemed a treat ever since I took her to a Japanese restaurant and she ordered noodle soup and was given chopsticks to eat it with. She couldn’t really manage them, except singly as a kind of load-bearing punt, and I ended up feeding her, ferrying food, noodle by fat noodle, from bowl to hungry open mouth like a mother bird feeding her gaping-beaked young with worms.

For ordinary pasta, keep bottled tomato sauce on hand and containers of pesto, both good quality. Pesto might not sound like children’s food, but they like much stronger flavors than adults give them credit for. But don’t buy phony cut-price versions. How are children ever going to know how to eat well if they’ve been reared on inferior ingredients or ersatz foods? I don’t mean—and I can’t stress this enough—you must always provide them with comestibles shipped over from Peck or Fauchon, but don’t pretend that an inauthentic article is the real thing. By all means cook rice and stir in peas and corn—just don’t call it risotto. I speak as someone who gives her children canned ravioli as a special weekend treat when I feel too tired even to put a pan of water on to boil, so I’m not claiming rarefied or superior status. But I don’t pretend it’s the real thing or that the difference doesn’t matter.

COUSCOUS

Just as children love pasta, so they seem to love couscous. This is even easier. Put some quick-cooking couscous in a bowl and pour over some boiling water (about 2⁄3 cup water for ½ cup couscous). Leave, covered, for about 10 minutes. That’s it. Stir in some soft butter and give it to them to eat.

That’s the basic, baldest method. Mostly I tend to bolster couscous with vegetables and use stock rather than water; my regular standby involves chopping 1 carrot in the baby processor until it is in tiny cubes and shards, and then boiling it for 2 minutes in a saucepan of bubbling water to which I have added 1 vegetable bouillon cube for every 2 cups of water. I then shake in some couscous, bring it all back to the boil, take the pan off the heat, and cover, leaving it for about 10 minutes. You can fork in some olive oil or butter, as you wish, but I think you do need some fat; small children find it easier to eat when the grains are sticking together rather than fluffily and otherwise desirably separate. You are not making couscous a Moroccan would be proud of, I admit, but nor are you setting out to. If you want to be really brazenly out of context, you can use frozen peas and corn in place of the carrot. Drained, canned chickpeas are the easiest option. Consider cracked wheat also; my daughter loves tabbouleh (see
page 236
) as well, astringent and onion-spicy as I make it.

POTATOES

Mashed potatoes is a good way to fill up a child. The easiest way to do this is the extravagant one. In other words, don’t peel, boil, then mash the potatoes, but bake the potatoes instead. Bake them (½–1 per child, about 60 minutes in a 400°F oven), eat the skin yourself (young children don’t seem to cope with this) sprinkled with a good pelt of coarse salt, crunch on crunch, as you fork some butter through the fluffy-cooked flesh in a bowl for your child.

As children get older they seem to prefer the potato kept separate from other things on the plate, but up to the age of two they accept various things to make the mashed, baked potato pulp into entire, distinct meals. Add more or less milk, depending on age. Obviously, the nubblier purées are not suitable for gummy-mouthed babies. Some of the ingredients I used may sound unappealing, but they didn’t appear so to my children, so may not to yours. You can add chopped ham, minced meat, strips of chicken, or crunchy vegetables to the side.

WITH CHEESE

When the mashed potato is still at its hottest—don’t pour in the milk to thin it first—grate in whatever cheese you want. I started off, when my children were babies, with Gruyère and then went on to Cheddar or Parmesan or a mixture of both. Fork potato and cheese vehemently together until the fine strands of cheese start to melt. (I find a hand-held Mouli cheese grater, with drum and handle, the easiest way of doing this, but then I hate those knuckle-shaving punctured metal box graters.) Then stir in milk or milk and butter to make the mixture more liquid. If you want to boost the caloric value of this meal, add a dollop of mascarpone (or cream, of course). I sometimes beat in a raw egg yolk for this reason, too, but I am confident about the healthfulness of my eggs (see
page xx
). I know the accepted wisdom is that babies and small children shouldn’t be given uncooked eggs to eat, but it is not a wisdom I have accepted.

WITH PESTO

From a very young age, both my children loved pesto and ate anything with it in. I add about 1 tablespoon to the flesh of each potato (½ tablespoon per child) and beat it in till smoothly amalgamated. Add 1 tablespoon or so more oil. If you’re being echt, which could mean being fancy, you should use Ligurian olive oil to dovetail, culinarily speaking, with the pesto. I do happen to keep this in the house and because it is milder than Tuscan oil, with less of the throat-hitting pepperiness, it is probably more instantly palatable for small children anyway. Sometimes I mix in a bit of quick-thawed and cooked finely chopped spinach; go cautiously with the pesto and spinach, but you can add more than the amount I’ve suggested if it turns out your children like this purée even stronger and greener. I’m not sure I’d try this on children before they’ve eaten pesto on pasta, not because I think they may not like the taste (I’ve not met one who doesn’t) but because all children have an inbuilt caution about mixtures.

WITH EGG

If you don’t like the idea of introducing raw egg (and I would recommend always using eggs that are checked for salmonella, anyway), you can just soft-boil or poach 1–2 eggs, stir in the oily yolk, and then the finely chopped white. If you’re worried about albumen, hard-boil the eggs and then push the dense globes of yolk through a sieve onto the potato, and think of this, archly, as mashed potato mimosa. Add milk as required and butter as desired.

WITH VEGETABLE PURÉE

A few gloopy tablespoons of puréed butternut squash, orange-fleshed sweet potato, or carrot stirred into the potato will make a good orange bowl of mashed potatoes for babies; for older children, you could grate over some Cheddar and shove the purée under a grill for a minute until scorched and almost crunchy. Substitute puréed corn, if your child doesn’t mind a few rough bits, and whole corn kernels if they are beyond even gravelly purées. You could use peas (frozen peas, cooked, then puréed with a knob of butter and a tablespoon of Parmesan are wonderful with potatoes, whether you’re a child or not), but I’d avoid other grassier green vegetables here. In all cases, consider a dollop of mascarpone for ballast and perhaps the merest, sheerest grating of fresh nutmeg.