Faces on food....only when the animal is in a field!

I recently spent a joyous Saturday night in ‘The Royal India’ in Dinas Powys.

My children aged eight and six happily tucked into prawn puri, onion bhajee, chicken korma, lamb saag and naan.

Their favourite restaurant is ‘Wahaca’.

The one in Chandos Place is the venue of choice whenever we visit London and the opening of the one in Cardiff last autumn caused much excitement.

They devour pork pibil, pinto bean quesadillas and green rice and of course, churros, gorgeous Mexican doughnuts.

My son is never happier than when he is downing the mug of chocolate sauce like a man who’s wandered lost in the desert for days and come across his first Oasis.

I was heartened that at no point in the ‘Royal India’ was I offered a children’s menu full of breaded ‘stuff’ and chips and food with funny faces on.

To my mind, the only faces that should be on food are on the animal that ideally is raised ethically, killed humanely and cooked beautifully.

In ‘Wahaca’ there is a children’s menu but its tacos and quesadillas, milk and hibiscus cordial.

It was a weekend when children’s food education was uppermost on my mind following the recent Jamie Oliver Food Revolution Day and his campaign to improve the food education we give children.

It got me thinking that too many restaurants too often make the assumption that parents only want to give their children chips and that children will only eat something with chips.

Recently my daughter helped me to make a pearl barley risotto.

She cleaned and sliced mushrooms, washed peppers and knew enough about food to express her preference for red pepper.

She suggested adding sweetcorn, not my ingredient of choice but I didn’t want to dampen her enthusiasm.

Amongst my friends one has a little boy who always asks for courgettes when he comes for tea, another has twins who happily munch through anchovies drenched in olive oil and herbs, another has a son who loves avocado, my daughter loves green olives.

Now I do not want to preach and I confess that my children love an ‘orange’ dinner on occasion. This consists of some sort of breaded fish, some sort of tray baked potato (either home-made wedge or shop bought crinkle) accompanied by baked beans.

I do look at the clean plate and know it would be easy to serve this up more often. But I know that part of my ‘mum’ job is to sometimes challenge their taste-buds, give them options, encourage them in the kitchen (coping with the mess and odd flavour combinations) and hope that I am doing enough to give them a healthy, balanced attitude to food.

Of course, part of that healthy attitude being that a fish finger sandwich, on crusty white bread, smeared with mayonnaise, every now and again, as part of a balanced diet, probably never did anyone too much harm.