The Tempting Apple: How to make raw fruits and vegetables appealing to kids

Nov 21, 2009 by

This post was featured on Food Renegade’s Fight Back Friday on Feb. 5, 2010

Let me just say right off the bat that the best ways to make raw fruits (and vegetables) or anything else that’s healthy more appealing to kids are:

1. Avoid giving them junk food. Ever. Kids who eat junk food develop a taste mostly for junk food.

2. Also: catch them when they’re hungry. Food plus hunger and nothing else equals kids eating.

3. Perhaps most important: do not push them to eat whatever it is. At all. Ever. Kids who are never pushed to eat will naturally like raw fruit. Kids who aren’t pushed do not develop food resistance.

Other posts here expound upon those topics at length. But here is a bit more on the topic of making raw fruit appealing.

The other night, I went to…

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A Perfect Kid Meal: Snow Crab Legs & Raw Vegetables with Red Pepper Garlic Mayonnaise

Jul 9, 2009 by

  

I’m all about mayonnaise now.  I pretend that all mayonnaise, even the cheap store brand, is mayonnaise in its ideal form, like I once made from freshly laid raw eggs from our backyard, free-range, happy hens (who are no more), with a little lemon juice, Dijon mustard, good olive oil.  There’s nothing you can say against a little mayonnaise, at least in its ideal form. Good egg, good oil—it’s health food.

Stock veggies dip I made this mayonnaise-based dip the other day and served it with raw carrots, cucumbers, jicama (a crisp, fresh Mexican root vegetable), turnip and radishes, along with some ready-to-eat snow crab legs I found on sale for $5 a pound. I had never served crab legs…

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Salmon with Chili-Mango Salsa

May 27, 2009 by

This delicious recipe takes about 20 minutes to throw together. One of my favorite ways to eat salmon, it makes a great company dinner, especially in the summer.  It’s appreciated by young and old.

This recipe gets an extra star for qualifying as a Caveman meal. The foods the earliest humans, who were hunter-gatherers, are supposed to have eaten (pre-cooking) are the most nourishing ones.  These foods include all vegetables (greens, roots, etc.), all fruits, nuts, meat, poultry, fish and eggs.  The first “processed” foods—those requiring cooking—included grains (wheat, rice, etc.), beans (pinto, garbanzo, black, etc., and peas, lentils), and potatoes, along with milk products. They are not nearly as good for us.

Nobody’s asking you to eat those critters and eggs raw, as the cavemen are said to have done….

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Cucumbers, Olives, Radish, Arugula and Feta Salad

Jan 25, 2009 by

 

A caveman-worthy recipe (except for the feta cheese), it includes a vegetable, a root vegetable, a fruit, and a dark green leafy vegetable. All raw.

My very favorite salad based on taste alone, it’s also unbeatably easy and quick, and outstandingly toothsome.

1 English hothouse cucumber or regular cucumber, quartered lengthwise and cut crosswise into ½ inch wide pieces

1 bunch of radishes, quartered

½ lb Kalamata olives, halved

1 bunch or about five oz. of arugula (strong-flavored green salad)

2 T olive oil

1 T fresh lemon juice

1/3 lb feta cheese, cut in little cubes

Combine cucumber, radishes, olives, arugula and cheese in a bowl. Blend oil and lemon juice in a separate bowl, with a little and pepper.

Adapted from Bon Appetit’s…

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