Marguerite
Active Member
Nancy, you said, "...if he's gaining weight and is healthy then just deal with it."
THat is very important. It is a good idea to keep an eye on your child's weight and growth because it IS highly relevant. And if it's all OK, then don't sweat the problem too much.
What we're dealing with in this thread, are those kids for whom it IS a big problem, who are not growing or who are very much underweight, believed by the doctor to be connected to their picky eating.
Part of the problem also, you have reminded me to mention, Nancy (thank you) is that stimulant medications can often suppress appetite (just as respiradone can stimulate it). Because of this, our kids' pediaitrician (the prescribing specialist) monitors their height and weight at every appointment. He has been the one to call for action and closer supervision, on the issue of fussy eating and Sensory Integration Disorder (SID)/food issues.
GoingNorth, I've made tapenade, which is a puree of pitted black olives (good Greek kalamata olives for preference), anchovies, olive oil. No need to add extra salt, it's salty enough. A small amount is stirred into various Italian dishes to boost the flavour. It does sound similar.
Where possible I like to make my own sauces like this. Partly because I'm a cheapskate, partly out of a sense of accomplishment (it's likemaking your own pasta or baking your ownbread - yes, I do all that as well) and partly so I can control exactly what goes into it. It also generally tastes better when it's freshly made at home.
I make my own basil pesto sauce, it's supposed to be made using pine nuts but since BF2 is allergic to them, I now use cashews. Toasted, for preference, because it makes such a big improvement to the taste.
The main drawback from me doing this sort of cooking, is the kids became fussier as they got older, because they lerned to come home for a home-cooked meal instead of eating fast food that didn't taste as good. The plus side - I've been teaching them how to analyse a dish they enjoy, to work out for themselves how to reproduce it!
I envy you your mother. Minealso grew up in the "eat what is put in front of you" era, my siblings all said I got it easy, I never experienced all the kids sitting in a row at the dinner table until they ate their burnt rice pudding, or their tripe and onions, or their gramma pie. I never got the gramma pie (which I believe is quite tasty, I don't know what my mother did to it to make it taste so awful for my siblings) but I did get the lamb's fry like shoe leather, and the burnt rice pudding ("it will be perfectly OK once I carve off the black bits.") My mother usually was conservative with things like flavour and salt, especially sparing with butter and cream. Her macaroni cheese was almost completely macaroni alone, boiled until it all glued together, with maybe a teasoon of bechamel sauce added to it, and a few shards of cheddar somewhere in there. And loads of fresh thyme to disguise the lack of anything else other than pasta. I love herbs, but I cannot use thyme on its own, because of the association with my mother's macca cheese.
husband's mother makes macca cheese that must be about 40% cheese. No thyme at all. Lots of tomato, plenty of cheesy bechamel sauce. It's delicious.
My mother raised us as if we were still living in the Great Depression, which hit Australia very hard. We were isolated from the rest of the world, our international trade failed and then WWII forced the country to find its own way out of it. The Victory Garden" was one small way, I grew up with a back garden plus livestock that grew enough to feed all ten of us. That meant we HAD to eat what we were given. If only my mother had let me eat my food raw! I used to raid the garden for my raw food supplies, pulling up carrots and picking beans then eating them without even washing them, a lot of the time. But I had to be careful to not let the drop in production show.
I began to learn to cook in cooking class at school. Of course, helping with the evening meal had always been one of my chores, but they were my mother's recipes, not my choice. I finally was permitted to cook what I wanted, when I was in high school. About that time my older sister began travelling the world and bringing home new ingredients and new recipes for us to try. Australia was also becoming more cosmopolitan and I discovered that adding garlic and/or tomatoes to a recipe could make just about anything of my mother's taste edible.
We live in a different world, to the one in which a lot of us were raised. When I was a kid, a special summer treat for me, maybye every few years, was being permitted to **** on the seed of a precious mango AFTER my mother had cut up the rest of the fruit for a family party fruit salad. And today I just bought myself another box of mangoes, the third this summer. I forgot to buy pineapple - another fruit we didn't buy often because it was too much trouble (and expensive). We now have a pineapple slicer - a wonderful Aussie invention. Today I looked along the rows of frehs vegetables and realised that most of them were unknown to my parents when they were my age. And my parents were farmers! It's bizarre.
I'm not that old, either - 53.
Oh the Vegemite/Marmite thing - Marmite IS savoury like Vegemite (and also needs to be spread sparingly) but te amount of sugar is a trace. It's still enough to put me off it. I shared a flat once with a bloke who liked honey and Vegemite sandwiches, and he was a slob. He would not clean the knife between dipping it in the various jars, so we would have the Vegemite tainted with honey, plus black streaks trailing through the honey jar. It made both of them inedible to the rest of us. He would then leave the knife glued to the kitchen table.
Sometimes if your kid is faddy, it can be a good adventure to discover new foods together. When we go on holiday, it is our custom to shop for the local ingredients, and try to cook with them. Hence in New Zealand we ate a lot of kumara and also ate it in ways the locals do (kumara chips, or fries). One evening stuck in a blizzard in a motel, I boiled up some locally bought yams in the electric kettle. Different. tasty with a dollop of butter, though. Good comfort food. But after trying whitebait fritters, I will pass on them in future. To difficult child 3's credit, he did have a bite.
In Victoria (the state south of us) we've fished for Rainbow Trout and then steamed them with ginger, shallots and teriyaki sauce. difficult child 3 ate all his, perhaps partly because he caught the biggest fish.
As a kid I hated fish, my mother would always squeeze lemon juice over it to entice me to eat it. I would taste it and hated it for the soapy, acid taste. Then one week I was away on a school trip staying in a fancy hotel, and getting VERY hungry because it all tasted too strange. They served up fish and my heart sank. But tis time, I tried it (I was hungry) and realised, it was the lemon! I hated fish with lemon juice all over it! To test myself, I ate it all (enjoying it) and the last two bites, I put lemon on it. I had thought it was perhaps a particularly good piece of fish, but no - I couldn't eat it with lemon.
When I got home I had to keep reminding my mother, to NEVER put lemon on my fish or I wouldn't be able to eat it.
Sometimes the answer can be very simple.
We've now got to the point where difficult child 3 has discovered a lot of foods he really enjoys. There are still a lot of things he hates and we take this on board. He dislikes prawns (shrimp) so we won't force him to taste foods which are very similar - so no making him taste prawns, shrimp, lobster, crab in any form. But he enjoys calamari, octopus, smoked salmon (loves it!) and an increasingly wide range of fish.
Every success increases the chance of more success. That's another reason to not force the issue.
So keep tabs on the child's weight and height, compare it to the average as well as family history (ie don't stress if everyone in the family is petite) and let your child feel secure. First and foremost. Keep a variety of food available (or at least, a supply of frozen meals he WILL eat, for emergency use). If he has to wait while you microwave something he would prefer, then that is the natural consequence of not wanting to eat what everyone else is having. But otherwise, don't make a huge issue out of it or you make even more trouble for yourself.
I like the mental image of the "garbage can teen". BF2 is like this, it was a shock when he moved in. difficult child 1 is pretty much like this now. difficult child 3 - I doubt he ever will be. And easy child 2/difficult child 2 - never. I think if you cut her finger, she'd bleed ham, cream and pasta.
Marg
THat is very important. It is a good idea to keep an eye on your child's weight and growth because it IS highly relevant. And if it's all OK, then don't sweat the problem too much.
What we're dealing with in this thread, are those kids for whom it IS a big problem, who are not growing or who are very much underweight, believed by the doctor to be connected to their picky eating.
Part of the problem also, you have reminded me to mention, Nancy (thank you) is that stimulant medications can often suppress appetite (just as respiradone can stimulate it). Because of this, our kids' pediaitrician (the prescribing specialist) monitors their height and weight at every appointment. He has been the one to call for action and closer supervision, on the issue of fussy eating and Sensory Integration Disorder (SID)/food issues.
GoingNorth, I've made tapenade, which is a puree of pitted black olives (good Greek kalamata olives for preference), anchovies, olive oil. No need to add extra salt, it's salty enough. A small amount is stirred into various Italian dishes to boost the flavour. It does sound similar.
Where possible I like to make my own sauces like this. Partly because I'm a cheapskate, partly out of a sense of accomplishment (it's likemaking your own pasta or baking your ownbread - yes, I do all that as well) and partly so I can control exactly what goes into it. It also generally tastes better when it's freshly made at home.
I make my own basil pesto sauce, it's supposed to be made using pine nuts but since BF2 is allergic to them, I now use cashews. Toasted, for preference, because it makes such a big improvement to the taste.
The main drawback from me doing this sort of cooking, is the kids became fussier as they got older, because they lerned to come home for a home-cooked meal instead of eating fast food that didn't taste as good. The plus side - I've been teaching them how to analyse a dish they enjoy, to work out for themselves how to reproduce it!
I envy you your mother. Minealso grew up in the "eat what is put in front of you" era, my siblings all said I got it easy, I never experienced all the kids sitting in a row at the dinner table until they ate their burnt rice pudding, or their tripe and onions, or their gramma pie. I never got the gramma pie (which I believe is quite tasty, I don't know what my mother did to it to make it taste so awful for my siblings) but I did get the lamb's fry like shoe leather, and the burnt rice pudding ("it will be perfectly OK once I carve off the black bits.") My mother usually was conservative with things like flavour and salt, especially sparing with butter and cream. Her macaroni cheese was almost completely macaroni alone, boiled until it all glued together, with maybe a teasoon of bechamel sauce added to it, and a few shards of cheddar somewhere in there. And loads of fresh thyme to disguise the lack of anything else other than pasta. I love herbs, but I cannot use thyme on its own, because of the association with my mother's macca cheese.
husband's mother makes macca cheese that must be about 40% cheese. No thyme at all. Lots of tomato, plenty of cheesy bechamel sauce. It's delicious.
My mother raised us as if we were still living in the Great Depression, which hit Australia very hard. We were isolated from the rest of the world, our international trade failed and then WWII forced the country to find its own way out of it. The Victory Garden" was one small way, I grew up with a back garden plus livestock that grew enough to feed all ten of us. That meant we HAD to eat what we were given. If only my mother had let me eat my food raw! I used to raid the garden for my raw food supplies, pulling up carrots and picking beans then eating them without even washing them, a lot of the time. But I had to be careful to not let the drop in production show.
I began to learn to cook in cooking class at school. Of course, helping with the evening meal had always been one of my chores, but they were my mother's recipes, not my choice. I finally was permitted to cook what I wanted, when I was in high school. About that time my older sister began travelling the world and bringing home new ingredients and new recipes for us to try. Australia was also becoming more cosmopolitan and I discovered that adding garlic and/or tomatoes to a recipe could make just about anything of my mother's taste edible.
We live in a different world, to the one in which a lot of us were raised. When I was a kid, a special summer treat for me, maybye every few years, was being permitted to **** on the seed of a precious mango AFTER my mother had cut up the rest of the fruit for a family party fruit salad. And today I just bought myself another box of mangoes, the third this summer. I forgot to buy pineapple - another fruit we didn't buy often because it was too much trouble (and expensive). We now have a pineapple slicer - a wonderful Aussie invention. Today I looked along the rows of frehs vegetables and realised that most of them were unknown to my parents when they were my age. And my parents were farmers! It's bizarre.
I'm not that old, either - 53.
Oh the Vegemite/Marmite thing - Marmite IS savoury like Vegemite (and also needs to be spread sparingly) but te amount of sugar is a trace. It's still enough to put me off it. I shared a flat once with a bloke who liked honey and Vegemite sandwiches, and he was a slob. He would not clean the knife between dipping it in the various jars, so we would have the Vegemite tainted with honey, plus black streaks trailing through the honey jar. It made both of them inedible to the rest of us. He would then leave the knife glued to the kitchen table.
Sometimes if your kid is faddy, it can be a good adventure to discover new foods together. When we go on holiday, it is our custom to shop for the local ingredients, and try to cook with them. Hence in New Zealand we ate a lot of kumara and also ate it in ways the locals do (kumara chips, or fries). One evening stuck in a blizzard in a motel, I boiled up some locally bought yams in the electric kettle. Different. tasty with a dollop of butter, though. Good comfort food. But after trying whitebait fritters, I will pass on them in future. To difficult child 3's credit, he did have a bite.
In Victoria (the state south of us) we've fished for Rainbow Trout and then steamed them with ginger, shallots and teriyaki sauce. difficult child 3 ate all his, perhaps partly because he caught the biggest fish.
As a kid I hated fish, my mother would always squeeze lemon juice over it to entice me to eat it. I would taste it and hated it for the soapy, acid taste. Then one week I was away on a school trip staying in a fancy hotel, and getting VERY hungry because it all tasted too strange. They served up fish and my heart sank. But tis time, I tried it (I was hungry) and realised, it was the lemon! I hated fish with lemon juice all over it! To test myself, I ate it all (enjoying it) and the last two bites, I put lemon on it. I had thought it was perhaps a particularly good piece of fish, but no - I couldn't eat it with lemon.
When I got home I had to keep reminding my mother, to NEVER put lemon on my fish or I wouldn't be able to eat it.
Sometimes the answer can be very simple.
We've now got to the point where difficult child 3 has discovered a lot of foods he really enjoys. There are still a lot of things he hates and we take this on board. He dislikes prawns (shrimp) so we won't force him to taste foods which are very similar - so no making him taste prawns, shrimp, lobster, crab in any form. But he enjoys calamari, octopus, smoked salmon (loves it!) and an increasingly wide range of fish.
Every success increases the chance of more success. That's another reason to not force the issue.
So keep tabs on the child's weight and height, compare it to the average as well as family history (ie don't stress if everyone in the family is petite) and let your child feel secure. First and foremost. Keep a variety of food available (or at least, a supply of frozen meals he WILL eat, for emergency use). If he has to wait while you microwave something he would prefer, then that is the natural consequence of not wanting to eat what everyone else is having. But otherwise, don't make a huge issue out of it or you make even more trouble for yourself.
I like the mental image of the "garbage can teen". BF2 is like this, it was a shock when he moved in. difficult child 1 is pretty much like this now. difficult child 3 - I doubt he ever will be. And easy child 2/difficult child 2 - never. I think if you cut her finger, she'd bleed ham, cream and pasta.
Marg
