In her book The 52 New Foods Challenge (which I referenced in my last post), Jennifer Tyler Lee discusses the power of what she calls “gateway foods”: ingredients your child already likes, which will make them more willing to branch out and try a new dish. For example, Lee once served blueberries (which her kids love) in a simple fruit salad with chopped mango (which was new to them). Her kids were more willing to try the mango because it was paired with a favorite, familiar food.
Maybe your picky eater’s gateway food is blueberries, or some other colorful, vitamin-rich fruit or veggie. My kids’ gateway ingredients tend to be some shade of beige: things like noodles, chicken, rice, and cheese. They would gladly try to survive on those four foods alone, if I let them. The good news is that since my kids like those things so much, they will usually try a recipe that includes one or two of those items.
Case in point: One of our favorite recipes is Italian Orzo Soup, which contains carrots, celery, tomatoes, and spinach. It also has some chicken and a lot of pasta, and my kids focus on those things so much that they don’t pay much attention to the vegetables mixed in with all the orzo. I do have one child who invariably leaves a bunch of tomatoes in their bowl when they carry their dish to the sink after dinner, but all things considered, one kid shunning one vegetable isn’t too bad.
The Power of Croutons
Another illustration of the gateway ingredient principle could be entitled “The Power of Croutons.” While I do have one older child who loves lettuce (she eats romaine leaves like potato chips–different strokes for different folks), most of my children only eat salad for the croutons. One evening I got tired of kids asking for a third serving of croutons, so I told them they could have one crouton for each lettuce leaf they ate.
I gave each of my younger kids a crouton on a very small lettuce leaf, and they actually ate it, then asked for another crouton-lettuce combo. Emboldened by this unexpected success, I gradually gave them larger leaves, and they still ate them up. Ironically, my pickiest child is also the biggest fan of this crouton-and-lettuce thing. Don’t underestimate the power of croutons.
Gateway Categories
Sometimes an entire food category can be a gateway. I know of one mom serves a vegetable in a pureed soup before it ever appears in on her kids’ plates, because she knows her kids love soup. Once they’ve learned to like the flavor of broccoli or leek soup, she serves the new vegetable in a non-pureed form later in the week.
Soup is a helpful gateway category at our home too. My soups tend to have lots of different flavors and textures going on, so if I add in one more thing, my kids don’t mind. For example, they might object to eating hominy on its own, but if I stir it into Tortilla Soup with beans, tomatoes, and some crunchy tortilla chips, they’re willing to give it a try. In fact, they may not even notice it’s there.
Green Smoothies
My favorite gateway food category is green smoothies. Frankly, I use this gateway hack more on myself than on my kids. I know I need to eat more veggies and a wider variety of fruits, but I struggle with that for several reasons:
- It’s hard to find a variety of good fruit in some seasons of the year.
- After I’ve worked hard to prepare a main dish for dinner, I rarely have the energy to make a veggie-rich side dish to go with it.
- I’m inexplicably salad challenged. They seem simple enough, but I’m just not very good at making tasty ones.
Green smoothies solve all of those problems. Frozen fruit is packaged at the peak of ripeness, and it’s available and affordable year-round. I can prepare and drink a smoothie in the time it would take me to even assemble a salad, much less eat it. Best of all, smoothies are a yummy way to add a lot of healthy variety to my diet. I can make a Mango-Orange Smoothie with spinach today, a Creamy Blueberry Smoothie tomorrow, and a few other smoothies the rest of the week, and boom! I’ve added lots of colorful fruits and healthy greens to my diet while my taste buds get a treat every day.
Adapting Smoothies for Picky Eaters
I’d like to say that green smoothies are a gateway for all of my kids, too, but that’s still kind of a work in progress, partly because I started making green smoothies when most of them were old enough to think green drinks were weird. My youngest will drink anything I pour out of a blender (more spinach, my little Smoothie Buddy?), partly because I started my green smoothie kick before he formed negative opinions about green food. My second youngest is also my pickiest child, and she’s characteristically choosy about what smoothies she’ll drink. However, I’ve found that she loves Green Monsters so I make those regularly and I’m hoping I can devise some variations that will persuade her to branch out this summer.
As for my oldest children, one will occasionally sample my smoothies, but the other refuses because she prefers Daddy’s smoothies (with more juice and less banana). Maybe I need to meet her halfway, and blend up some smoothies that are more her style, with a little spinach tossed in. I think my blender and I have a lot of experimenting ahead of us. 🙂
Want more ideas to get kids eating healthier? Check out the rest of the posts in this Adventurous Eater series:
7 Ways to Get Kids Eating Healthier (the intro to this series)
