Eating

Every Sunday afternoon I take my 6 year old son to dance, a sport which he absolutely loves for the high-flying acrobatics that the men get to do. Well, not so much at his age, but they are starting into some of the fun stuff and he gets to watch the older boys do it. This kid is a natural artist and we want to encourage that in every way we can. A couple of weeks ago now he asked me completely out of the blue if we could take some snacks to dance with us, which I thought rather odd since we had not done that sort of thing in a very long time - since he was maybe 2 or 3. When the boys were young we used to fret about going anywhere without having a supply of snacks on hand for them - I guess this is probably common with all new parents. Better to have a happy child than a whiny child. But it has been years since have done this and it struck me as odd that he'd ask for it out-of-the-blue.

I managed to shoe him out the door without the snacks, but then when we arrived at dance I finally clued in as to where this request really came from - every single kid at dance had a constant supply of snacks being shoveled into them by their parents. It was literally non-stop eating, and got me to thinking a lot about this.

I just convinced my 7 year old to eat some par-cooked (blanched) carrots, and it struck a note with me that we've used a number of techniques over the years to get our boys to try new foods. In this case my wife had purposely only par-cooked the carrots so they would have a crunchiness to them still - our oldest loves raw carrots but will not eat them cooked. This was a perfect "gateway technique" to get him eating cooked carrots too. It took a while to convince him to try the first carrot, but once he did, he was fine and ate it all.

Perhaps one of the most unscrupulous "gateways" we've introduced were the notorious "supper timbits". I had gotten an idea that since the boys (about 3 and 5 at the time) loved Tim Horton Timbits so much, that we should deep fry our falafel instead of making burgers, and tell the boys they were "supper timbits". It worked like a charm and now we basically can introduce any food by using the "gateway" of deep frying it into a ball the first time we feed it to them. Sure, deep fried foods are terrible if they eat them every day, but much as we love ours, it is still limited to 2 or 3 times a month so this is just fine for growing boys who are otherwise active (which many their age are not these days)

A lot of us go to places like Costco and buy the huge containers of various food items because it saves us money - and it is usually an awful lot cheaper per ml to do this, no doubt about it! But the downside is of course that once you open the container, it takes up an incredible amount of room in your fridge, and you have to eat it quickly before it goes off. So you may end up overeating to get through it all, or losing some of your great savings to spoiled food.

Home canning to the rescue!