One thing our culture really loves is junk food rewards. When a group is doing well at work, someone brings in donuts or cupcakes. The worst is when you send your kid to school with a healthy lunch but they get junk food rewards for behavior or other achievements from their teachers. One time we put our kids in Saturday school, and the school was having a problem with some families not arriving by the 9:00 start time. They decided to remedy the situation by passing out “free snacks” tickets to the first 30 kids who arrived. The leader of Saturday school met with the parents and said, “This is one dollar of free food for your kids, so get them here on time.” You would have thought he said ‘ten dollars’ because the next Saturday the room was packed. Parents really wanted their kids to get this free “food” but it wasn’t real food. Besides, the kids don’t have any control over what time the parents drive them to the school anyway, so it was a strange award.
My son was one of the kids that got a ticket. Across the back of the room were tables covered with junk foods. I was appalled to see him come back from the table with two pop-tarts and a bag of Cheetos – to have for a snack at 9am. It’s not like they had a bowl of fruit up there – not that he would have picked fruit with all those other temptations. But now what are you going to do – tell your kid he can’t have the reward being passed out?
It’s never too late to put some strategies in place after you’ve had a chance to assess a situation. Take healthy snacks to work each week so that when someone brings in junk, first of all you aren’t starving at the time, and second you can give yourself your own reward. For Saturday school our solution was to have the kids take their own healthy snack every week and not even accept the $1 ticket.
Weaning kids off of junk takes some work too. Chicken nuggets weren’t in fast food restaurants until I was in high school so they weren’t of interest to my peers. We didn’t eat out much anyway. But now give the kids a choice at just about any restaurant and they usually pick chicken nuggets. After I figured that out, we started to veto any deep-fried choices and tell them to pick something else; finally I said they were never ordering chicken nuggets again to put an end to the discussion.
Now that we’re eating real food, mostly cooked at home, there are still occasionally obstacles. One for me was that my daughter said she didn’t like capers and would pick them off. The rest of us love capers. Today we had broiled tilapia on the menu, and on the way home I came up with an idea to disguise the capers in a paste that I would rub on the fish. It came out perfectly and she was the first one to compliment the fish coating. What food snubs are you getting from family members? Let’s see if we can figure out a solution.
Disguised Caper Pecan Coating for Broiled Fish
4 tilapia filets
2 T butter (or dairy free substitute)
1 T capers
1/2 t balsamic vinegar
1/4 t Old Bay seasoning (or season salt, paprika, etc.)
1/4 C finely chopped pecans
1 t maple syrup
4 T shredded parmesan (optional)
Preheat broiler. Melt the butter and stir in the capers, vinegar, and seasoning. Mash the capers with a fork as you stir to combine. Add the pecans and syrup and mix. Dry the fish filets and put a teaspoon of the caper/nut paste on each filet. Spread the paste on the filet. Put filets paste side down on a pan covered with sprayed foil. Put another teaspoon of paste on the top of each filet to use it up, and spread over the filets. Drizzle with a tiny bit of oil. Broil three minutes. Gently flip filets over and broil another three minutes. If you’d like to top with shredded parmesan, sprinkle a tablespoon over each filet and broil 2 more minutes.
