When you have a picky eater at home, whether they are 2 or 42, it makes getting a meal on the table each night a colossal headache. Often it means whomever does the cooking will end up preparing two meals or surrendering to the fact that their picky eater will eat nothing and then beg for junk and snacks later.

My two-year-old son loves to spit out food he deems “unworthy” (that’s code for anything green or remotely healthy). Since I struggle with this issue every, single day I am always on the lookout for solutions that might just work.

An Interview with Sasha Martin, Creator of GlobalTravelAdventure.com

During one of my searches for good family dinners, I happened across Sasha Martin’s website, GlobalTableAdventure.com.

Sasha, the blog’s creator is a longtime foodie and world traveler. She also happens to be married to a picky eater and the two of them have a young daughter, Ava. When Ava was an infant, Sasha worried that Ava would inherit her father’s finicky taste buds, and devised an ingenious plan to gradually expand her family’s dinner repertoire.

She calls it eating her way around the world.
One night a week, she prepares a dinner from a different country in the world. She is making her way around the globe, country by country, from A-Z and is currently a little over halfway through her journey. She documents each meal and the recipes she uses on her blog, so busy moms like us can follow in her footsteps without having to reinvent the wheel.

I loved the fact that Sasha’s adventure gave us a radically different way to think about our daily dinner battles. Rather than focusing on trying to please sensitive individual palates, why not turn dinner on its head and make it an adventure? So I reached out to her to see what she has learned about getting picky eaters to try new things.

Sarah: A lot of moms really struggle to get their kids to eat anything other than white food: pasta, mac & cheese, chicken, etc. Did you start your daughter on this cuisine when she just started eating solids or did you make a switch?

Sasha: Our global adventure began right when Ava just started eating solid foods. She will have sampled cuisines from 195 countries by the time she’s five! So, in a sense I never let her become a persnickety eater. That said, she’s a totally normal kid. There’s a video montage of her on the site showing her trying lots of different foods – many of which she didn’t like and promptly spit out.

Sarah: What do you do when your daughter doesn’t want to eat one of the dishes you’ve prepared?

Sasha: There are many places in the world where children have only one option for dinner and they are grateful for the dish of food in front of them. Even though we live in a country where it is possible to have multiple options for dinner, there’s no real reason to do so. When my daughter was a baby, I’d offer her the food I cooked and if she didn’t want it, she could still nurse. Now that she’s strictly on solid foods, I allow her to have a banana instead of what I have cooked. While she likes bananas, she usually will end up trying what I’ve prepared.

Sarah: How Did You Get Your Picky Husband to Try New Dishes?

Sasha: My husband has truly adapted really well. I have to admit, he wasn’t super-excited to do this, but he has been a great sport about it. In the early days, I had to invite friends over to eat the world cuisine with us so that he’d have some peer pressure to at least try what I made. As we got further into the adventure, he began to get more interested in how the food came together, asking things like, “what is it that I taste in there?” By the time we hit the halfway mark, I noticed that he wasn’t nearly as picky as he had once been. Even if he doesn’t love the dish, he’s realized it’s not going to kill him to try it.

Sarah: How would you advise moms with picky eaters to broaden their repertoire?

Sasha: I’ve found the main reason someone thinks they don’t like a dish is because of the texture of the ingredients. Play around with different way to prepare things so that offending textures become minimized. For example, my husband claims to hate mushrooms. But when I chop them up finely, he loves the flavor they add to dishes. Experiment with chopped versus whole ingredients. Play around with roasting versus boiling and you may find your picky eater doesn’t really hate the ingredient at all.

Another really important thing for children: involve them in the process. Put them in front of a mixing bowl and let them do something. Involving them in the preparation makes a massive difference. And if you have even one square foot of space to grow something, like a tomato plant, do it. My daughter hated tomatoes…until she saw one grow in our back yard. Now I have a hard time keeping her hands off of them.

Sarah: How has your adventure made getting dinner on the table easier?

Sasha: It’s really easy to get stuck in a rut, especially with vegetables. It turns out there are lots of interesting and delicious ways I never would have thought of to prepare them. For example, take green beans: in one country, they steam them, in another they put cloves in them, in another they chop them up and put them in a rice casserole, and in another they puree them to make a green bean soup. It’s neat to have lots of different ways to prepare the same thing!

My personal experiment with GlobalTableAdventure

After this interview – I started testing out the global table adventure idea at my house. So far, it’s been a raging success. I’ve learned how to make insanely delicious dishes like this
basmati rice & chicken dish from Afghanistan

Naan bread (which my 2YO couldn’t get enough of and is easy enough to make quickly during the weeknight)

And a super-simple, but delicious way to cook zucchini and squash (which normally my boys turn up their noses at, but in this case they gobbled up).

I may not follow each week perfectly according to plan, but it is lots of fun contemplating where we’re going to go next. I’m amazed at how in such a short time this simple thing has become part of our weekly ritual (Sundays mostly). Our five year old now has a map of the world in his room and each time we cook from a new country, we put a red dot sticker on the map. He and dad usually do research about the country while I cook – we all love “hearing” the language spoken via YouTube clips and podcasts and make a point to learn how to say, “please” and “thank you,” which we use during dinner to make it feel that much more authentic.

I look forward to getting to “see” and “experience” the world through Sunday dinners at our house.

Do you have picky eaters at home? What have you tried to expand their repertoires? We’d love to hear.

This is the third installment of a four-part series on how I transformed myself from frozen food queen to healthy weeknight chef. Yes, it is possible to go from almost never cooking anything from scratch to cooking virtually everything from scratch. Even if you work full-time like I do. It may take awhile (I took a full year), but you can do it.

If you missed the other installments, you can read about phase I (Fits & Starts) here and phase II (Mastering the Basics) here.

Experimenting with New and Fun

This third phase of the year of my transformation was all about branching out from the basics and experimenting a bit.

As we headed into the summer months, our local farmers market opened and shopping suddenly became really fun for the whole family. We got in the habit of walking to it every Sunday and discovering new things to try, from leeks to kale, mustard greens, pasture raised chickens, and tomatillos…

Typically I’d create the week’s menu by outlining the building blocks for our meals, namely the proteins and the grains. But then I’d leave the vegetables and sauces up for grabs. The overflowing bins of vegetables at the market never failed to steer me in interesting directions.

One evening, a tomatillo salsa verde made a wonderful accompaniment to talapia.

The kids loved it, and my husband begged me to make the salsa again just to have on hand. It was that good.
{image & recipe via: Pinch My Salt}

Another night, I whipped together a leek tart. This is a wonderfully fast and relatively easy dinner to make. Perfect for those nights when you look in the fridge and don’t have too much left in there. I had tried my hand at an apple pie or two, so making my own crust wasn’t entirely a new thing. The good thing about a homemade crust is that it is generally delicious – even if it doesn’t come out perfectly flaky. Don’t be intimidated.

While at the beach with family, on my night to cook, I tried my hand at homemade pizza.

While not something I recommend for large parties (we were 28 people – oven space fell a little short), it is a great and really easy dinner for a single family. I have fallen in love with Tyler Florence’s pizza sauce recipe and use the pizza dough recipe from the back of a package of Fleischman’s pizza yeast. It has become our new go-to Friday night recipe.

Quinoa burgers made it in to the menu set.

I’ve tried these with and without eggs (without when my vegan relatives were visiting at Christmas). When making them without the eggs, just use something like cornstarch or a little extra flour to make them stick together. The tzatziki sauce that goes with this recipe is insanely good, but I’ve found you only need 1/2 to 1/4 of what’s called for, so I usually half the recipe. In general, Eating Well Living Thin is a wonderful resource for delicious and healthy recipes. I highly recommend perusing her blog.

Fish tacos were another hit of the summer.

And super, super easy. The tangy sauce is delish, but like the tzatziki sauce for the quinoa burgers, a little goes a long way. Definitely 1/2 the recipe for it.
{image and recipe by Daisy Cooks Sometimes}

And how could I forget this beautiful recipe for Thyme Scented Salmon with Tuscan White Bean Salad that I found in a Cooking Light Magazine from May 2003? I had stashed it away with my cookbooks and forgotten about it until I was hunting for some new and different dishes. It took a little longer to make as there are quite a few fresh ingredients to chop. But aside from all the chopping, there is nothing complicated about it. I think the elbow grease is worth it as it is both melt-in-your-mouth delicious and wonderfully nutritious.

The bottom line is, once you’ve mastered some basics, branching out an adding new and exciting dishes to the menu set is critical in helping maintain momentum. For me, I found that experimenting kept interested and excited about cooking in this stage. It kept me from stagnating.

Of course, not every dish I tried came out beautifully. But as I gained confidence, my fear of failure melted away. Nothing was ever so bad it was inedible.

My rule of thumb is that I have to prepare a dish three or four times before I really “get” how to both cook and flavor it to my (and my boys’) taste.

Confection Heaven

Dinners weren’t the only thing that I experimented with in this phase. I also threw my hat into the baking and confections arena. Because I love me some sugar.

It all started with my oldest son’s birthday. We decided to throw him a monster truck themed birthday party in our back yard, and I felt compelled to bake him a proper monster truck cake.

Miraculously, my gamble paid off. You can read the step-by-step monster truck cake tutorial here.

Bolstered by my monster truck cake coup, I leaned on my aunt to teach me how to make bread from scratch and she kindly obliged.

Now, once a month, I turn to this step-by-step bread-making tutorial and make four loaves for the month. I keep one loaf out and freeze the others, pulling them out as needed.

Once you start making your own bread, it’s pretty impossible to go back to the store bought kind. I’ve only had to buy bread twice since last summer. Once when we were just back from vacation and had nothing in the pantry, the other when I was battling the flu.

As the summer fruit season kicked into high gear, we also enjoyed

Strawberry shortcakes

{image and recipe via Fine Cooking}

Julia Child’s apple tarts

I followed the recipe from Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking, but this recipe from the Little Blue Hen looks about the same.
{image and recipe via: Little Blue Hen}

Paula Deen’s peach cobbler

Now, this one isn’t for every day as it is not the healthiest concoction. But can I just say, we all went weak at the knees on this one. With fresh picked peaches, it is simply divine.
{image and recipe via: Food Network}

A doggie birthday cake for my youngest

And my personal favorite, raspberry jam.

Since raspberry jam was the very last thing my mom ever made, making it held special significance for me. Surprisingly, it only took 35 minutes from start to finish. And wow, so good. Next summer, I will be making lots, lots, lots more as we plowed through ours before winter really ever set it.

Looking back, the key to maintaining my momentum in this arena was clearly just being willing to experiment – and fail. My first apple tart looked pretty sad. But it tasted great. Each time I make it, it gets prettier and prettier. My first batch of raspberry jam was a disaster. I had to toss the lot because I overcooked it. But I tried again and it turned out beautifully.

Indeed, the overarching theme to this entire journey has been: if at first you don’t succeed…try, try again.

What would you cook if you weren’t afraid to fail?

This is part two of my journey from slapdash meal assembler to cook. If you missed the first two posts, find the the post detailing why I made a resolution to get my weeknight cooking buttoned up and my post about the first tentative steps I took on my journey from slapdash meal assembler to organized cook.

Phase II: Mastering the Basics

After the fits and starts of January and February (okay and most of March too), I was starting to feel like I was getting the hang of cooking.

Because I kept making and re-making “standards,” I now could prepare the likes of a very basic baked ziti, red lentil dahl, and baked fish without consulting a cookbook. Not to mention rice, barley, and couscous, which were (and still are) my go-to starches.

As far as vegetables were concerned, I found my boys gravitating to salads, green beans, and broccoli. Dark leafy greens like spinach and kale were not ever well received when I experimented with them. So I didn’t fight it and focused on keeping the things they liked rotating in and out. My default prep for veggies is still to this day steaming.

Here are two of my “standard” menus from around this time. They are basic, basic, basic – some might even say boring. But they weren’t frozen or take out. That meant I was, in the words of Charlie Sheen, “WINNING.” The rest of team Welch loved them too.

Super Basic Baked Ziti Dinner

• 1 lb of dried ziti pasta
• 1 15 or 16 oz tub of ricotta cheese
• 1 jar of pasta sauce (sometimes I make my own by sautéing a little garlic in 1-2 TBSP olive oil, after a few minutes adding a can of diced tomatoes and some Italian seasoning or fresh herbs if I have them like parsley, oregano, and basil. I let it simmer for 5 min or so and voila. Done and look ma, no preservatives! Now if they’d only start canning tomatoes in glass jars rather than BPA lined cans…sigh)
• 1 Cup shredded Mozzarella Cheese
• Italian seasonings
• Salt & Pepper to taste

To make, just boil the pasta until it is al-dente. Once you drain it, return it to the pot and add the ricotta cheese, pasta sauce, and about 1 1/2 tsp of Italian seasonings. Mix well. Add salt and pepper to taste. Then dump the coated ziti into a 9×13 baking dish, top with the cheese and put in the oven for 30ish minutes at 350. Sprinkle the top with parmesan cheese and serve.

While the pasta is cooking, use the time to make a salad or steam some veggies.

As I promised yesterday, here is the story of the first part of my journey from someone who relied heavily on packaged goods, frozen dinners, and take out to someone who cooked healthy dinners from scratch at least 6 nights a week.

Phase I: Fits & Starts

Of course I started strong out of the gates.

On January 1st, I think I pored over the 10 cookbooks in my stash for about two hours while I made a detailed menu and shopping list. I carefully printed or copied recipes for the week and organized them in a plastic sleeve that I boldly labeled “Recipes” and kept on the countertop. I dragged the family shopping at Whole Foods, embracing my new Mother Earth image with aplomb. Dinner the first night took me a full 3 hours to get on the table, half of it hands-on prep. I made an absolutely delicious vegetarian lasagna from the delightful cookbook The Healthy Kitchen by Andrew Weil & Rosie Daley.

My husband, a meat lover, thought it was delicious. My oldest shouted, “THANKS FOR MAKING SUCH A BAWICIOUS BRAZAGNA MOMMAY!” My youngest slurped it up too, occasionally grinning at me from across the table between fistfuls of spinach and noodles.

Lights twinkled and the angels sang. My chest swelled with pride.

I can DO this!

And then the weekday hit. I got something resembling the dinner from scratch I had planned on the table the second night. But by the third, my usual chaos was back. Conference calls, immovable deadlines, and revisions, revisions, revisions kept me in a frenzy until 5:55pm. Oops. Thank heavens I still had some frozen Bertolli dinners in the freezer. Three more days like that and my pride-filled chest was nothing more than a deflated sac.

Who am I kidding?!

The image of my mom was a powerful motivator though. The next Sunday morning I got right back in the saddle, poring over the cookbooks, making my menu and shopping lists, although this time I shopped at my local Stop & Shop. The second week went much like the first: three real meals, four quazi-ones.

And around and around I went in fits and starts through most of January and February. I can DO this! Who am I kidding?! I can DO this! Who am I kidding?!

Fortunately, I had done two things right when I framed my resolution. 1) I had given myself plenty of runway to figure this out – 12 whole months. Even though I was technically “failing” in this stage, December still felt far enough in the future that I believed I could crack it if I stuck with it. And (2) I had tied one hell of an emotional motivator to my resolution. How could I not want to carry my mom’s legacy forward for my boys?

I cannot understate the importance of having a massively important emotional reason to keep you going when you want to give up.

Suggested Reading

As my interest in healthy foods/cooking grew, so did my appetite for books on the topic. There were two books I read during this period that made a lasting impression – and strengthened my resolve to make this resolution stick.

The first, Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer, the acclaimed novelist and author of Everything Is Illuminated.

The author was motivated to explore the topic by the arrival of his own son. As an on-again, off-again vegetarian his whole life, he felt he needed to come to terms with the issue as he would be making dietary choices on behalf of his child – a responsibility he took very seriously. Just that notion alone reminded me that I hadn’t been making the best dietary choices for my boys (because I was “too busy”). It made me want to redouble my efforts.

Mr. Foer is a wonderful storyteller, so even though this is very much a non-fiction book, it reads more like a fast-paced novel. For me, by far the most compelling portions of his book involved his dive into the horrifying world of factory farming. I honestly had never really thought much about how the animals that I ate and fed my family were raised, slaughtered, and brought to market. But his chilling accounts of the mass cruelty as well as the biological and ecological ramifications stopped me in my tracks. His findings have been reinforced by other books and articles I have read since, so I don’t think anything is fabricated or exaggerated. The book provided a wake up call that has profoundly affected how we think about and consume meat and dairy products. We’re still omnivores, but we only consume meat and dairy products that have been pasture-raised and we made the shift right away. Yes, it’s more expensive, but you offset that by eating less of it, which is healthier anyway.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone who is in the process of making a transition to eating healthier.

The second book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michal Pollan brought me even deeper into the world of agriculture.

This book posed exactly the same questions that I was seeking, which is what compelled me to pick it up in the first place, namely: what exactly am I eating? Where does it come from? Why should I care?

Much has been written about this book, so I won’t bore you with another book report. Yet, I feel compelled to say, his analysis of the various elements that create our modern food chain has profoundly and permanently changed how I purchase the ingredients that go into our meals. For example, I no longer equate organic with sustainability and I buy almost exclusively from the Farmer’s Market when it is in season.

Literally, not a day goes by where I don’t think about something I learned in this book.

Have you read any compelling books about food? If so, please share them! Have you read either of the books I mentioned here? If so, what did you think about them?

Continue on to read Part 2 here.

PS – I just love this poster. Even though I no longer AM that woman, it still makes me crack a smile. You can buy one on AllPosters.com.

At the beginning of 2011, I decided to switch up my typical approach to making New Year’s resolutions. Rather than chasing five or ten different goals (and accomplishing maybe two-thirds of one of those), I decided to switch gears and make one big resolution — one that honored my mom and enabled me to keep her presence in my childrens’ lives.

The goal

My one resolution was to go from someone who at dinnertime relied heavily on this…

…and this:

To a mom who whipped up some healthy goodness like this at least six nights a week…

{image via: Little Yellow Kitchen}

…and even bakes her own bread.

A tall order to be sure.

But I figured that, given the time horizon, it was within the realm of possibility.

As it turns out, I stuck with it and have become one of those people I used to eye suspiciously, if not downright incredulously: one who genuinely enjoys cooking dinner. But you know what I enjoy even more? Three boys who actually inhale quinoa.

I swear it makes me want to break out into song every time I see it happen.

Rest assured, my path to culinary glory has not been a straight one. No significant behavioral overhaul is though, which is why I thought it might be helpful to share some of the key lessons from my journey. I know I can’t be the only person who relied too heavily on packaged, processed foods in order to get dinner on the table, right?

The Journey

While I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, I gradually worked my way through four distinct phases between January and December. During the first phase, I flailed around and generally stumbled more than I succeeded. In the second phase I started to get my sea legs. By the time I got to the last two stages, I was really having some fun.

Over the next few days I am going to share with you the details from each stage of the journey. I’ll dole it out in bite-sized pieces because, as my mom always said, a little bit of chocolate every day is SO much better than a pound of chocolate all at once. Start here for the embarrassing recap of the first phase of my journey from frozen dinner queen to healthy weeknight cook.

Have you ever made a significant behavioral change? What was it? How long did it take to stick? Did you go through “phases?”

The winner of the Speedy Sneaky Chef is: Bryanna Smith

Congratulations Byranna! Please email sarah @ getbuttonedup dot com with your details.

This contest is now closed.

REVIEW & GIVEAWAY

As I lamented in my BabyCenter post this week, motherhood is humbling. Just when you think you have it all figured out, you get knocked on your smug tush.

My latest knockdown came at the dinner (and breakfast and lunch) table. My youngest has suddenly taken an offense to vegetables of all kind. I’ve tried cutting them up into microscopic pieces and hiding those in spoonfuls of rice. But the second his precious little tongue feels even one little bit of healthy veg – he shrieks, “too much!” and spits out whatever he has in his mouth.

It was kind of funny the first time he did it. I think we laughed.

We should have kept it in. This kid has a thing for making people laugh. And the problem is, once he got a laugh, it stuck – even as our initial guffaw turned to tears. I’ve tried bribery, dips, making animal and face shapes, everything I could think of to make the veggies palatable – all to no avail.

I swore I would never puree veggies and hide them in their food. But Lachlan had other plans for me.

Last week I finally admitted that to get him to eat anything I was going to have to get my sneak on.

The Universe must agree because guess what book just hit the shelves: The Speedy Sneaky Chef.

The New York Times bestselling author’s new book offers over 85 new, faster, healthy recipes, with added fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, that are lower-calorie, higher in nutrients, and can be whipped up in just minutes. There are dozens of quick fixes for store-bought foods using innovative short cuts for tried and true Sneaky Chef purees.

I tested one of the recipes for protein-packed pancakes this weekend and my little guy inhaled them. So, so far so good. The process wasn’t nearly as daunting as I had made it out to be in my head. I’m looking forward to putting them all to the test, including making a cauliflower and zucchini puree to put into spaghetti sauce.

Mwahahahahahahaha.

The great thing about motherhood is that eventually, even if it takes a few months, you always get back up off your tush. A little bruised perhaps, but always wiser.

giveaway Details

The Sneaky Chef is offering a signed copy of her latest book The Speedy Sneaky Chef and an apron to one lucky reader!