Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I have the definite impression that it is harder to get picky eaters to eat their veg than it is to eat their fruit. I guess that is probably down to fruit being generally on the sweet side of the taste palate. But whilst fruit aversion may be less prevalent there are still plenty of fussy kids who won’t go near the fruit bowl.
It is important to remember that however much fruit juice you can get down them, juice, in whatever quantity can only count as one portion of their five-a-day. If they’ll drink them, smoothies are a much better option and you can hide veg in there too. When you have bananas going black on you, peel them and chop them up into one inch discs and stick them in the freezer to add to smoothies instead of ice for a creamy sweet hit. I often use frozen yoghurt and ice-cream in my smoothies too so that they’re more like a milk-shake treat than a 5-a-day chore!
Izzy hardly ever bothers with the fruit bowl – she has a classic teenage idleness to peeling or preparing fruit – but she’ll put away a huge bowl of berries or fruit salad if I make it for her. I remember that horrible insipid sloppy fruit salad in syrup you used to get in tins from my youth and cringe…..ugh. But fresh fruit salad, served in a mixture of orange and lemon juice is hard to beat even for non-fussy eater adults. When I’m on a diet I like to make a huge bowl of fruit salad and keep picking at it whenever I’m hungry but Izzy always gets to it first and polishes off the lot!
My grandmother always made jelly with fruit juice instead of water and as well as making the jelly much nicer, it inspired all sorts of ideas for using fruit juices in place of water elsewhere. With her jelly, it tended to be orange juice but I often use orange and raspberry and add pureed raspberry too. I also use apple juice in lots of sauces, particularly things like baked beans or homemade ketchup.
Pureed fruit is great to use as a sauce in its own right with ice-cream or stirred through frommage frais or yoghurt. You can even used tinned fruit for this. Mango works very well.
If you have a child who has more of a savoury tooth and doesn’t like sweets and fruit, then try adding grated or pureed apple to things like cottage pies or bolognese sauce. Try Chinese recipes like chicken and peaches with ginger and sesame. Grilled peaches are great with cheeses in a salad. In fact salads are a great place to add fruit generally. Strawberries and pistachio with goats cheese and quinoa and some salad leaves packs a great nutritional punch.
Chocolate hides the flavour of many fruits so you can add blueberries to a chocolate milkshake or to brownies without them being obvious for example. The same goes for blackberries or raspberries.
