Most people are horrible cooks now-a-days.  It probably explains why we’ll consider going out for dinner to a chain restaurant, and overpay – for crappy foods.  Seriously, 80% of today’s restaurant food is complete garbage!  Why do we think it’s so great?  Because not even we can make basic foods anymore!

This brings me to my point.  If you’re going to please your toddler, you’re going to have to make the basic foods taste good enough for a critic.  Your child is in no mood to humour your half-assed attempts at making veggies.  If they taste like crap, he’ll just move from the top down in terms of what tastes least worst.  If he goes hungry, he’ll make up the calories and vitamins by nagging for treats outside of meals.  Usually these end up being empty calories from carbohydrate snacks and sugars from fruit drinks in effort to suck some nutritional value out of them.  Naturally, this doesn’t work, so your toddler fights malnourishment despite consuming a glut of calories – empty calories as it where.

So time to re-work the kitchen.  If you don’t want to over think things, then just add salt and butter.  Trust me, you can make just about anything taste good by adding butter!  Cheap restaurants even know this.  Next add any sort of fat and more salt, then add some sugar.  Okay, I’m being facetious now.  In seriousness, you don’t want to fat, salt and sugar load your toddler.  However, that being said, you could cut back such toppings on “good foods” – foods your toddler enjoys and put them on top of foods your toddler does not enjoy so much.  Instead of topping toast with cheese to make garlic bread, put the cheese (fat and salt) onto the broccoli instead, then add some garlic.  Careful not to overcook the broccoli to a soggy mess!  See what I mean by critic.  Also make sure you cut the broccoli up into small pieces first so your presentation remains worthy of your toddlers eyes.  Foods have to look good too!

Dips and sauces can spice up meat, but you can also top veggies with it too.  Why douse fries in ketchup when you can put it all over asparagus?  Okay, this might not work, but then again, it just might – give it a try.  Brown sugars can be added to boiling water to help carrots too.  Just remember to cut back on the fruit drinks to make the exchange even across your toddlers complete diet.  A favourite of my son’s is Cajun spice on top of mixed veggies – a delight.  He also enjoys plenty of garlic – even from straight from the spice jar and chili beans, bring them on!  Your baby isn’t interested in eating his foods because they are boring!

In most cases it’s the veggies that are the issue, but even sometimes meat can hang some kids up.  Try cutting things up finely, try adding sauces, try swapping for beans or eggs and so forth.  Your child’s tastes are going to evolve over time, but instead of getting frustrated, try making foods taste more like restaurant foods.  Chances are pretty good that if your toddler is rejecting your foods, it’s probably not that good anyway.  Maybe it’s cold – re-heat it and offer it again.  There are many little details that matter to your toddler that he can’t communicate readily to you.

I had a similar problem with my son.  Then I modified his eating schedule and diet.  At first I decided to limit snacks to just 3 cookies each day.  In the morning, the first time he asked for one, we’d count them out in a container.  He could have them all at once, two or just one, it was his call.  When the cookies ran out, that was it until the next day.

This worked pretty good, but I still wondered why he would want to snack.  I looked closely at what foods he was eating for breakfast.  We started him on cereals, milk and fruit such as a banana.  What we didn’t realize was he was basically just eating sugar.  The cereal is a carbohydrate and so is the banana.  The milk has some fat and protein, but not a lot.  I tried an experiment and gave him some egg for breakfast over a week and noticed his desire for snacks (crackers, cookies, etc.) dropped dramatically.  After a few months of introducing proteins and fats for breakfast along with carbohydrates his snacking diminished significantly.  After a while, he barely even asked for any treats despite us being willing to give them to him.

My theory is that kids grow accustomed to the sugar highs and lows from eating carbs.  In fact, do you know of any treats kids ask for that aren’t loaded with sugars?  Think of fruit drinks too, cookies and crackers, chips, cereal, cereal bars, etc.  They are all loaded with sugar.  This puts kids into sugar, sugar, sugar all day long.  It also puts them at risk for childhood obesity and also for diabetes later in life.

I’m not a nutritionist but do study diet carefully for my own sake.  Changing my eating habits has also helped me last longer between meals.  So now instead of just eating toast and cereal (basically the same exact thing), I eat an egg with cheese with cereal, or even a baked potato (in the microwave) with an egg.  I’ve also introduced beans into my diet as well and won’t hesitate to eat a “dinner-like meal” for breakfast consisting of left-overs so long as it includes meat.  I was talking to a family member who’s undergone a bit weight change for the better, she has dropped carbohydrates from her breakfast menu and has added instead protein shakes.  She says it lasts a lot longer to fill her up so she doesn’t feel hungry.  It makes sense to me.  I’d add that we should be looking at inclusion of fats too.

Many cultures eat much differently than ours and it’s not much of a surprise that when the American diet takes over, these other cultures tend to gain weight fast.  Try to explore your diet a bit more and think about the sugar, sugar, sugar you and your baby eat all day long.  Try to come up with some alternatives and see if it doesn’t help you.

After killing my second popcorn maker I vowed to learn how to make my own popcorn from scratch.  Bizarrely, it was so simple it really makes you wonder why anyone in their right might conceived of popcorn makers in the first place.  For starters, it requires an extra machine made with poor quality marksmanship from some factory offshore, and second, it does a poor job at what it does.

To make your own popcorn, all you need are popcorn seeds, oil (I use olive), a big stewing pot with a lid.  If you want a tub, you’ll need 1 cup of un-popped seeds.  This is usually how much I put in for one batch.  If you want more, just repeat the process.

First add enough oil to cover the bottom of your pot plus a bit extra.  You can use as much as you want, but generally you don’t want to overdue it on the grease.  Next bring your oil to temperature.  Make your pot hot!  I go to ¾ as high as my stovetop will allow which is significantly higher than what I’d use for frying an egg.  You want your oil to be almost so hot that it’s burning, but not quite so.  Play around with your settings and once you get it right, stick to this.  All stoves are a bit different.

Next, drop in 3 popcorn seeds and cover the lit.  Gently shake it a few times while waiting.  You want to wait until all 3 seeds are popped before adding the rest of the seeds.  Dump the lot in and cover again.  Shake the seeds around every so often while keeping the heat on high.  I’ve found that it’s not really necessary to constantly shake the seeds as some mention, but rock it a few times just so the bottom seeds don’t burn on one side.  The popcorn will naturally rise to the top leaving your seeds at the bottom.

Not being one for wasting, I wait until the popcorn is almost all popped.  This is hard to tell, but you’ll get the hang of it after a while.  Just give it some time in between pops.  You don’t want to go too long or your risk ruining what you have already popped.

Dump and serve!

Simple topping ideas:

#1 Melted butter and salt.

#2 Melted butter with brown sugar, cinnamon and some salt.

#3 Just cinnamon (for toddlers whom you don’t want to offer too much sugar and extra fat/salt).

When mixing get a covered container and shake in topping a bit at a time while adding more popcorn to help evenly disperse it.  There are tones and tones of popcorn topping ideas on the Internet, so find something your family and toddler enjoys.  Tried Cajun spice, parmesan, pizza flavouring, caramel?  Give it a whirl!

Warning: Be sure to supervise small children with popcorn and remove any seeds before serving!

It’s funny.  Our grandparents had no choice in the matter – they just made your parents food.  However, with the advances in marketing, your parents were faced with a choice, either to make your food or buy it from the store – it’s likely they did a bit of both, but favoured homemade foods over store-bought.  Now you too have a choice, you can either buy it from the store or make it yourself.  Surprisingly your cohort probably buys most baby foods from the store.  Oddly, it’s probably because they lack an alternative.

This strikes me as odd.  I mean, how hard is it to turn foods into the store brand variety.  You’d think baby foods required a lot of extra processing, a lot of ingredients, special blends, vitamin additions, or lots of specialized tools.  Not so.  Baby food is just adult food ground up.  That’s it!  There’s really nothing more to it than that.  You might also be curious to know that baby foods have changed very little over the years and remain relatively pure.  They lack harsh preservatives, sugars and salts.  This is in complete contrast to adult foods (and sadly enough – child snacks).

Knowing this, all it takes to make baby foods is a food processor – scratch that, I never had one.  Let me start again, all it takes to make baby food is something to cut and mash food up.  That’s right!  I made 80% of my son’s baby food with a knife and potato masher.  I mashed carrots, peas, potatoes, bananas, apples and even meat.  If you’re smart, you keep your left-over baby jars and just refill them with your own brand.  Fruits are best left fresh though, but even these can keep in the fridge for a day.  A brown apple might look bad to you, but is surprisingly tasty to a baby.

When you do make your own food though, be sure not to store it for too long a time, as by cutting and mashing you are increasing the surface area of the foods and therefore increasing the area bacteria can grow and multiply.  Freezing pre-prepared foods is just fine, but also keep in mind that once foods are frozen, the bacteria that is already present goes through a second bloom once defrosted and rapidly grow.  Freezing foods does NOT kill bacteria, it only slows its growth.  This isn’t a big deal, but when you freeze foods you want to avoid waiting a long time beforehand, then freezing, then waiting.  In other words, if you’ve made a lot of food, freeze it right away so it stays fresh longer!

Besides that, there isn’t much to do about making your own baby foods.  Just have a peak in the baby food isle and decide what kinds of foods are good for babies.  Remember that while baby foods will only be consumed for a short period in your baby’s life, they can be costly.  Our aim was always to move our son onto our eating schedule so we could all eat the same foods.  This is one of the biggest savers – our time and energy making and serving meals, not to mention the added expense of specialty foods.  Even as a toddler, our son ate what we ate, no choices or exceptions.  Your toddler is your biggest food critic so if he won’t eat it, chances are pretty good that it’s not very tasty!  Keep that in mind next time you plan your meal!