Summer Holiday Food Challenges

Sure, it’s lovely to have the kids off school for six weeks – when they’re behaving, that is. And one of the biggest causes of arguments and constant battles can be what they’re eating, or rather, what they won’t eat.

At least when they’re at school, you can feed them their usual quick breakfast, send them off with their packed lunch and they’re usually too worn out and starving when they get home to make too much of a fuss about what’s for dinner.

But when you’ve got more time during the holidays and you’re eating three meals together each day, fussy eating habits can begin to grate, causing tension and casting a dark cloud over the summer.

via GIPHY

Kids tend to be more engaged with their food when they’ve had a hand in making it, so to end those teatime tears for good and make sure the sun always shines over your dinner table (not literally, that’d be unbearable after a while), here are six food challenges – that’s one per week of the school holidays – to set little ones to get them enjoying their food.

Lunchtimes might not be a problem when they’re at school and can take their standard sandwiches, apple, flapjack day in, day out. But when you try them on something different at home, it can be a very different story.

The solution? Sending them to bed hungry or banning them from TV time probably won’t solve the issue long term. However, getting them to make their own lunches should.

Prepare some ingredients for them and leave them on the kitchen table, placing an empty plate in front of them. For example, you could lay out sliced bread, pittas, crackers, cubes of cheese, slices of ham, chopped peppers, lettuce and thin slices of cucumber. Then, let them know they can be as creative as they like, but that they have to have at least one salad ingredient on their plate.

Hopefully they’ll go for cheese and crackers with salad or a ham and salad pitta, but if they end up with a pile of crackers topped with just cucumber or a load of ham and lettuce and no bread, it doesn’t matter, as long as they’re experimenting and eating!

By the end of the week, you should both have a much better idea of what will go down well at future lunchtimes, and you should encourage them to play more of a part in making their own lunches once they’re back at school too.

Despite your best efforts, some kids refuse to eat anything except the same foods – Every. Single. Day. Of course, this can be very limiting, so a good challenge to try during the summer holidays would be to get them to try two new foods each week, in return for a sticker. If they amass six stickers over the course of the holidays, they’ll get a treat.

If it’s new types of fruit or veg you’re getting them to try, start by chopping them up small. If it’s different sauces, ask them to try just a teaspoonful to begin with. If you know lumps of veg are going to be a problem, blend them up with your Tefal high-speed blender to hide them.

And persevere – you’ll get there, eventually!

It’s a well-known fact that food tastes better when it’s arranged in a fun shape. Funny faces are the classic option; kids will always react much better to the prospect of eating a silly face with spaghetti hair and broccoli ears for tea than simply being presented with a pile of veg and pasta.

Getting some fun moulds can also help to make your food presentation more appealing. For instance, serving rice in a star shape or using biscuit cutters in the shape of dinosaurs or other characters to shape pieces of chicken before cooking can make a standard meal seem much more exciting.

By the end of your food art week, get your little ones to come up with their own designs, giving them plenty of praise for letting their creativity shine.

Sitting down together to plan a week’s meals is another good way to get kids more engaged with what they’re eating. Encourage them to pick a few dishes that feature some of the new flavours they’ve been trying, as well as they’re usual favourites to get some more variety into their diet.

Let them pick a couple of desserts too, and if it seems like they’re only picking unhealthy stuff like waffles, ice cream and chips, look for healthy ways to make these, like doing your chips in a Tefal ActiFry.

Write the week’s shopping list together too to get them to understand more of the whole process of preparing meals, and ask them to think about where different ingredients could be used in more than one meal.

Once they’ve mastered a few basic planning and preparation skills, let them design an entire three-course menu, Come Dine With Me style. They might need a little help when it comes to the prep and cooking, but try to let them take the lead as much as possible. Just think how proud they’ll be to serve up their work to you!

This is a great task to help little ones realise what it’s like for you when they refuse to eat something you’ve put a lot of effort into making, so try to explain this to them in the calmest way possible after you’ve tucked in – and let them off washing up/setting the table duties for the evening!

For the final challenge, we had to go with something fun to reward them for all their effort over the past few weeks, and it doesn’t get much more fun in the kitchen than baking a cake. Everybody needs a signature bake under their belt, ready for when they’re called up to The Great British Bake Off, naturally.

Keep an eye on children when it comes to using the oven, but they can weigh out flour, crack eggs and stir in sugar all by themselves, especially with a kid-friendly recipe like these simple fairy cakes from Baking With Granny or some cute gingerbread people using these instructions from What Jessica Baked Next.

Overall, remember that patience is key and fussy eaters can’t be cured overnight, but by turning food into something fun and interactive rather than something stressful, you’ll get there eventually – good luck!