Always coming up with new dishes or innovative ways to make your children eat veggies or fruit can be exhausting. Things that work one day will be refused another day, things that are inhaled one one day will be the most disgusting thing (“and I have never liked this!!”) once you finally bought enough to fill the fridge with it. It’s annoying and I totally get it.
For this blog post, I brought you three simple dishes with 4 extra ingredients, plus a base tomato sauce. The tomato sauce is simple to make, you need an onion, garlic, 2 tins of tomato, herbs of your choice and a bit of water. Additionally you can mix in any vegetables you’d like, I used red peppers and carrot. Fry off all ingredients, add the tinned tomato and one tin of water, let it cook for about 15 minutes and blend it down.
Feel free to use leftover sauce or make a big batch of it and freeze it in portions, in my case I made a huge amount a few weeks before to use up wonky vegetables from the vegetable drawer in the fridge and froze it, as I wasn’t sure what to do with it.
The first recipe is Pasta with tinned salmon, peppers and parmesan and couldnt be simpler: While boiling the pasta, fry frozen, sliced peppers with a tin of salmon, mix with tomato sauce and heat up. When the pasta is done, mix it in and sprinkle parmesan on top. This recipe provides you with two out of your 5 a day and also comes with valuable Omega 3, which is essential for brain development in young children.
The second recipe is Gnocchi with cherry tomatoes, courgette and feta cheese. Bring some water to a boil, in the mean time slice or grate the courgette and cut the cherry tomatoes into quarters. Cook your gnocchi until they rise to the surface, which takes about 2 minutes. Fill the cooked gnocchi into a pie dish or an oven tray, sprinkle the cut vegetables on top. Cover with tomato sauce and crumble feta cheese on top. Very young children (under 2) might struggle with the texture of the gnocchi. Feta cheese is also quite salty, so make sure to adjust the amount of cheese you use.
The third and final recipe is my favourite, as I’m making this a lot – even being a chef, sometimes I don’t fancy cooking. Your ingredients are couscous, chicken thighs and peas, plus a spoon of curry powder and ready made naan bread. Add couscous to a bowl, cover with boiling water and tightly wrap in clingfilm. This is my favourite hack to make couscous, it’s super quick and all is left to do is loosening it up with a fork. Fry the chicken, add the curry and the peas and the tomato sauce, Let it simmer for a bit and serve with the couscous and the naan bread, sliced into fingers. From my experience, children love couscous, but it’s a huge mess. If you can, let it dry for a couple of hours and hoover it up then, it’s much easier to remove it from the floor when dry.
These basic recipes work with any vegetables you have, even if it’s leftovers or already cooked, frozen or looks a little bit wonky – make your life easy – not everything needs to be picture perfect, because children don’t care about your photos, they care about the taste and recognisability.
These are my 10 minute recipes with tomato sauce, I hope you liked them.
If you’d like to see a video of it, head over to my instagram @janajarrettnutrition and check out my reels.
Let me know what you think!
Jana Jarrett Nutrition 