A big shout out to ABC Radio NSW for being a Stand for Children's Health. Each week, I will be chatting to Patrick on air about food, family and children's health.
We've got loads of great topics we'll be covering. Most weeks, I will be on air live with Patrick on Tuesdays at 10.40am. However, some weeks I may be on a different day if I'm running school incursions.
Here is this week's recording.
Winter warmers
Patrick:
It's that time of the week where we focus on our children and their food choices and it's been getting colder and colder. So warmer foods are sure to hit the right taste buds this morning and even into the evenings as well. Belinda Smith is from The Root Cause.
Good morning, Belinda.
Belinda:
Good morning, Patrick and listeners. I hope you're all well today.
Patrick:
Are you keeping warm this morning?
Belinda:
Today is not too bad, but we had a really, really cold start over the weekend so today I'm defrosting, it's quite nice.
Patrick:
Well, let's talk a bit about as the temperatures get colder and colder, people want to stay warm and not just on the surface with your split systems or your heaters and fireplaces going but in the kitchen as well. Starting, well in the breakfast cycle, we all think about winter warmers and slow cookers and stews for dinner but starting the day right and keeping warm is also a great thing.
Belinda:
100%, I love to get people to think about, like winter, like food is about connection, but in winter it's really about like comfort and ease. And I like to get people to think about, you know, what can they do to make their life easier when it comes to food. And winter really brings that to us because we can cook things in advance and then pull them out and just, you know, like quickly reheat them and. It makes life so much easier. I mean if you really want you can even make porridge which is a wonderful breakfast to start with, you know, with the rolled oats being a really great carbohydrate with some protein in it as well. But you can even cook that in a slow cooker if you want. You can pop it on late at night before you go to bed and the next morning it's ready for you. But so I mean obviously porridge is a great one.
Then making things like big pots of baked beans. which you can then you can do a lot of things with baked beans. You could serve them up with some toast obviously. You could heat them up and put some like couple of eggs in the top and bake them in the oven so that you've got the eggs and the baked beans. You can do the same kinds of things with chickpeas. You can also eggs are wonderful all-round breakfast but doing things like your scrambled eggs alongside your baked beans makes a really, really filling, nourishing breakfast.
At this time of year if you can get your hands on some rhubarb, some stewed rhubarb, some yogurt and they're the kinds of things that you can cook in advance and pop it in your fridge, pull it out in the morning and you know either whack it in the microwave or in your oven to gently reheat while you're getting the kids dressed for school, those kinds of things.
I think last week we also, or maybe it was another week, we spoke about simple things that we can get our kids involved to with making. And we spoke about a pancake mix, you know, like putting it in a jar, like one cup of flour, one cup of milk, and an egg, and like shaking it up and mixing it up. You can even make your pancake batter in like jugs and pre-make it and pop it on your freezer, your fridge door, and in the morning just pull it out and pour some into your fry pan to cook a couple of pancakes for breakfast.
So they're really kind of nice warm, nourishing breakfast that you can kick start the day with.
Patrick:
And what about into the lunchtime period and even with our children at school, I guess during winter, what's some of the great ideas for possibly a hot lunch for kids at school when you know, you get sent out into the world, it's recess or lunchtime and the temperature is a bit bitey. How do you keep the kids warm in their souls?
Belinda:
Well I think the first thing is to think about that everything that you create for a dinner or winter warmer meal can be reheated the next morning and put into a thermos to actually keep warm to the kids. So you know if your children love you know spaghetti bolognese for instance that's a wonderful kind of meal that you can have for night time and of course for your know. Yeah, pump it up with veggies and then the next morning, the best tool that you can have for your kids lunches at this time of year is a really great quality thermos and there's some tips about how to use a thermos.
The first thing is that you really need to preheat your thermos. So you know, to boil up kettle and fill up your thermos with hot water. pop the lid on so that it seals the heat in there. While you're doing that, then heat your food and heat it up really hot so that it then goes into your thermos. Obviously, empty the water out and then fill your thermos up and pop your lid onto the thermos and try not to reopen it again. Because what we really want to do is from a food safety point of view, just keep that lid on so it retains the heat so that it's still food safe.
Look I know it's really easy to you know when we're trying to watch our pennies to perhaps go for a cheaper kind of thermos but you really with the thermos it really does come down to you get what you pay for. So you know I would encourage people to really look at the different qualities of thermos, do product reviews of them and choose one that you know has some good reviews that show that they keep the food really warm.
And then any meal that you make of a nighttime, that's like turn it into your next day's lunch just simply by following that. So there's a lot of winter warmers. I love winter food because not only is it comfort because it keeps us warm but I like to think a lot of them as like set and forget kind of meals.
So there are things like, let's just start with our slow cooker. We need to have a mixture of our proteins and, you know, buy proteins. You can do your meat sourced or your plant sourced. With your meat sourced, buy your cheap cuts of meat, you know, things like your bigger pieces that you can then use across multiple meals. So like things like brisket or your lamb or pork shoulders and your chicken thighs which are cheaper than chicken breasts. Use those kinds of meats because they're cheaper.
You've got your liquid so you can use a like a broth or broth will always give it a better flavour. Your vegetables, your different kinds of herbs and then your flavours and boosters you know so that could be things like mustard, passata, even a little bit of Vegemite enrich the flavours and then if you want to really boost it up so you pad out the meals, you can add pasta or rice or quinoa towards the end of cooking to really bulk it up and you really do literally prepare that stuff, throw it in the slow cooker and certainly forget it, walk away from it. So really, really simple things and they make wonderful meals the next day, so they can all go into your thermoses.
And the other thing I guess about slow cooker meals is you can really use the leftovers for other things. So you know like it's quite possible that if you’ve made a big batch, I will often add in not just like say like chicken, but I might add in also towards the end of the cooking some cannellini beans or some black beans and it really bulks out the meal and then the next day as well as it being lunch I've got enough that can be used to maybe turn into a pie for dinner for instance.
Patrick:
Yeah right.
Belinda:
So yeah there's lots of ways and in fact I did a social post last night on my Instagram and Facebook pages just about how I did that over the weekend. It wasn't with a slow cooker, it was just cooked in my oven and it was basically 15 the one set of ingredients just use different ways and it worked out to three dollars per meal. So it can be really economically done as well. So if anyone's interested you can just jump across to either Facebook and Instagram and check out the social post about that. It was on @theRootCauseAU is the social handle for that.
Soups - so I've got a group of a wonderful family membership, Kids Health Quest and two of the all-time favourite soups are in there, Minestrone, and making your own three-minute noodle soup, which is really, really simple. You take some...
Patrick:
Three minutes?
Belinda:
Yes, not two minutes because you need to actually get slightly better quality long life noodles and they take longer to cook. So you get some broth that you've made and you throw in some grated a little bit of shredded chicken, throw that into the pot, boil it up, add in your block
of long life noodles and kids absolutely love it.
Another great soup that kids tend to love is tomato soup. So roast up some tomatoes, throw them in the oven and roast them up and then blitz them with some sauteed garlic and celery and then towards the end of the cooking time you know, kind of mash everything together, pour in a little bit of cream and it gives a delicious creamy soup. And that again, what makes a wonderful lunch the next day, butter some, a good piece of bread, pop it into their lunch bag alongside the thermos and they can dip their bread into the soup as well as eat that.
Patrick:
Lovely, gee whiz. It's 24 minutes past 10. I'm speaking with Belinda Smith from The Root Cause.
Belinda, before I let you go, on the subject of winter warmers and you've touched on making soups and busting out the slow cooker, which I'm sure is a staple of many Australian kitchens when it comes to the wintertime period, what about if you had to make a pasta dish? Is it a bolognese for you or do you like diving into the world of like a ragu on the slow cooker? Is there a staple that your family enjoys that's an easy one to knock out for the listeners listening now?
Belinda:
I do have to say that the Bolognese is an easy one to go to. You know, I do my menu plans on the weekends, and I always ask the kids, what meals would you like this week? And so my son said that he wanted bean pesto pasta, which is like I just make up some homemade pesto, then, you know, sauté some different vegetables, throw in the pesto, then add a couple of cans of cannellini beans and that's like my sauce. But my daughter said, can we have linguine as the pasta? So, you know, obviously boil up the linguine and then serve it in the middle where they just, you know, add it to the sauce onto their own amounts of the pasta. And we always serve that with some either steamed greens or salad depending upon what the weather's like. So, I guess if I was to think about all the years that I've worked with families over the last 10 years. Bolognese is the easiest.
But I would also encourage you as an adult yourself, if there's flavours that you like, pastas are a great way to introduce those new flavours to the kids. Because you can always cook up more of the pasta and serve like bolognese, which you know they will like, the sauce on the side, and also the kind of sauce that you would like to try. Pop it into the middle of the table and let the kids see you taking the flavours that you want and allow them the opportunity to try them. Because quite often we forego the food that we like because in our head we think, oh, the kids won't eat that.
Patrick:
Yes.
Belinda:
So letting them see and make that food available because of course if they can't see it, they can't eat it. If we're not putting it out, they're never going to get a chance to try it and learn if they like it.
Patrick:
Well Belinda, informative as always, some very great food ideas for some lovely winter warmers. Thank you again and looking forward to hearing from you next week.
Belinda:
Excellent. Take care everyone.
Patrick:
All the best. Belinda Smith from The Root Cause.
She's already got me thinking about busting out the slow cooker. Maybe at lunchtime I can quickly rush over and get a few ingredients and fire up the slow cooker, even just firing up a bolognese. All this talk about food, it's doing me no good. football season is onwards but not really running at any time period.