How to Cook Healthy Food for Kids : Make Easy Recipe for Eggplant Chips and Dip

I remember as a kid not wanting to touch any foodstuff that looked foreign to me or had an odd color.  I missed out on some sweet mousse just because I thought it looked like a pile of...poo.  I have vivid childhood memories of long standoffs involving my mom, myself, and nothing between us but a plate of untouched eggplant.  I remember the visceral feeling of enmity I had for this purple headed monster with a mushy grey interior.  Since those days, I have realized that I've been missing out on a truly versatile and remarkable vegetable.

Kids are visual creatures.  When it comes to food, if they don't like the look of something, they won't even try it.  In order to to get your kids to eat their vegetables and get the nutrition they need, you have to think like a kid.  Fortunately for me, that's not too far of a stretch.  Realizing that kids eat with their eyes first, parents can disarm their child's food antagonism by hiding or transforming food into visually approachable forms.

Three techniques that I repeatedly use with success to improve the nutrition of my kids include:

1. Pureeing vegetables
2. Encouraging hands
3. Encouraging dipping

By using a food processor to blend ingredients into a puree, you can take a vegetable that your child would normally reject immediately and make it unrecognizable.  Blending also has the advantage of bringing in new colors and flavors together into appealing combinations.  Allowing kids to use their hands and dunk their food into dips not only puts them at ease, but puts the fun back into eating.

I demonstrate the use of these techniques in the following clip on making eggplant chips and dip.  In this clip, I show you how easy it is to make your own eggplant chips and discuss why eggplant chips are a much healthier alternative to the traditional potato chip. 

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The eggplant dip featured in this video is a traditional Bulgarian dish called kiopoolu.  I adapted the recipe by blending all the ingredients together to also hide the tomatoes, which my son would typically pick out and reject.  You can warm up the color of the dip by using red bell pepper.  This simple recipe can be found at the following link:

http://easteuropeanfood.about.com/od/appetizers/r/kiopoolu.htm

Here's an easy recipe for making eggplant chips:

Eggplant Chips Recipe

Ingredients

• 1 eggplant 
• canola oil spray
• garlic salt
• 1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese

Directions

1. Heat oven to 375 degrees F. 
2. Wash and peel eggplant.
3. Cut eggplant horizontally into thin slices (the thinner, the crispier the chip).
4. Spray both sides of chips with canola oil, then sprinkle both sides with garlic salt and cheese. 
5. Bake in oven for 40 minutes until browned and crisp, flipping every so often.

 References

Schlosser E. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All American Meal.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Nestle M.  Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.  Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.

Mozaffarian D et al.  Changes in Diet and Lifestyle and LongTerm Weight Gain in Women and Men.  N Engl J Med 2011;364:2392-404.