CT FM 002:
How To Eat Healthy With Your Kids! Brought To You By: RecipeThis.com
Introduction Welcome to our second Podcast from CT FM. For our second Podcast we decided to look at a topic that many people just don’t want to discuss. And that is child obesity or in most cases family obesity. You know we have all seen the fat family out and about. The one in the park where the kids are carrying a lot more than just puppy fat and the parents that is on the large side too. I saw this just yesterday among my Facebook news feed. A fat dad taking his kids out and every picture he posts of them is with him buying them fast food. And it got me thinking. I live in Portugal and see very little of this. The only time I truly witness it is when the English are over on holiday during the summer months and the rest of the time the majority are slim or just a bit overweight rather than been obese. Then you have to ask yourself why? Why not the Portuguese? Well when you look at what they eat and the Mediterranean Diet that the majority of them follow as a normal way of life you can see how this happens. The first thing they put on any dinner plate is vegetables. This is followed by fruit, meat, fish and nuts and fast food is often an after thought. When I see the queues at McDonalds & KFC there is very few Portuguese as they are all at the local pasta bar or tucking into salmon and veg.
So I decided in this Podcast to focus on being healthy as a family. I am not talking about dieting as that is a dirty word in my mind, I am just talking about making sure you are your kids are healthy.
Cooking Tips I used to be fat. Not just a little bit fat but a lot fat. 70 pounds weight loss later and I am in the healthy range and what matters most to me is being healthy. I always wondered what healthy cooking tips I would have given to my fat self. You know the sort. The ones that you follow everyday without even thinking about it. So it brings me to the chicken. In the old days you would often just reserve chicken for when you have a roast dinner or when you were buying one of those chickens from the supermarket that was already cooked. But chicken is really good, it is super healthy and because of the protein in it, it has the ability to keep you full for hours. But as people that don’t eat that much, well unless we have our 14 year old that wants to eat everything and anything. So we will chop up our chicken so that it can go to two main meals. You can then have roast chicken and vegetables, chicken pie with the breast, chicken stir fry and the choices are endless. But first of all you need to learn how to chop up a chicken. So here is Dominic talking you through the whole process Hello its me, sorry I was just breaking out into the Adele song, hello im Dominic and iam here this week to tell you about how to chop a chicken. I do not like that term so I like to say how to pair up a chicken.
That’s a pair of breasts, pair of legs, pair of wings and that’s how to chop up a chicken. So to start with you have got your whole chicken from the supermarket or if your like us we buy them in bulk make sure you have taken the giblets out and thrown them away. They are not very nice and my gran liked to make gravy out of them and I did not like that either. So you have your chicken in front of you, so you put your bird or your chicken on your board and make sure you have got a very sharp knife. Have the chicken facing away from you so you have the legs facing the backboard and the wings closest too you. So you look at your chicken and you have got your 2 breasts and the breast bone down the middle. So put your finger on the breast bone and next to that you will feel a little plastic thing then just make a slight cut down the middle and you take it as close to the bone and the carcass as you can. You take the cut all the way down to where the wish bone is and follow it down to where the wings are. So you continue taking the breast away from the bone bit by bit by bit don’t rush it because you want as much meat on the breast as possible and if you rush it you will end up with most of the meat left on the carcass and a small breast and nobody likes a small breast do they. We all like a nice breast especially a chicken one. So slowly take your knife down the carcass and make sure you get all the meat as much as possible and down to the bottom and cut of with the wing that’s how I do it. So I have cut it off with the wing do exactly the same with the other side as well. The same again take it down from the cartilage in the middle of the chicken nice and steady as close to the bone as you can get all the meat of right down to the bottom add some pressure at the bottom to make sure the wing comes off as well. So now you have your 2 breasts with your wings on your board. So now turn your breast upside down and you will see your wings, they are held on by a little bone, so cut around the bone taking some meat with them
and chop them off straight through the breast not too much because abit of meat on your wing is nice. You do not just want to eat bones and nibbling away for half an hour but don’t take a lot of meat just enough. So now you have got 2 breasts with some nice skin and 2 wings. So now you turn your bird around and you have got your 2 legs staring at you. So you grab the legs and bend them down towards the bread board like snapping the joint and you will feel the bone pop out of its socket, it is like dislocating the thigh joints. Then you will see the line where the thigh is and where the bone has popped out of the socket you put your knife in and in one big movement cut down through the socket and cut around the carcass and you will have a thigh and drumstick. Same on the other side straight down one big movement don’t tickle it like you was with your breast and straight down and take it off, brilliant. You’ve got your 2 legs now and your carcass we leave that because there is some nice meat still on there that you can get. So now you have got your thighs and drumsticks. So you get your thigh and your drumstick and from the outside you can feel into the middle where there is a bone the knuckle so if you put your knife in the knuckle and slice it straight down you will have your drumstick and your thigh separated. It should be easy should be easy, if you are fighting it you are trying to chop bone and that’s just not going to happen do you know what I mean you are going to blunt your knife, anything could happen, you need to find the knuckle and gently make a big cut and the same with the other side. You now have got your 2 drumsticks and your 2 thighs, 2 breasts and your 2 wings. So now you look at your carcass and you can stick it in a pan to boil it for some gravy or chicken stock.
If you take your carcass and underneath near where you took the legs off you will see if it is a good chicken 2 fleshy bits of meat, get your knife in and take these pieces out they are lovely I like the pearl of the chicken so that is how to chop a chicken or pair a chicken.
Family Cooking Time It is our duty as parents to teach our children how to cook and how to eat and drink as healthy as possible. If we don’t the chances are they will leave home and live off takeaways and one day end up obese. My mother tried to teach me and failed miserably. I think she gave up with how much of the potato I lost when peeling one when instead she should have given me a peeler! My son on the other hand can cook better than I could at 18 and that is from years in the kitchen where he has watched and learnt from me and his Dad. I recently read that in England now they rarely teach cooking in schools so it really does just fall on the parents. But what should you teach your kids first. Well for us the first thing we taught Kyle was how to make a sausage casserole. It is very simple for a child to fill the slow cooker with the ingredients and then for him to report to you when it is cooked. Use your slow cooker to teach your kids. They can be chopping and preparing the vegetables while you do the meat and the sauce. It then becomes a family affair and they get excited that they are part of the cooking process. Plus after a while they get sick of you asking them to just set the table as they want to get involved!
Family Healthy Eating If you want to get your kids eating healthy you have two choices. You can con them or you can produce none processed versions of their favourite foods. I do both. Well a mum has got to do what a mum has to do! I was talking online recently to an American. And she explained to me just why she believed there was an obesity problem in America and it got me thinking. To cut to the chase she simply mentioned that unlike in Portugal where vegetables come first, in America they are just not there. Kids don’t want to eat vegetables and parents don’t push it on them. Our son on the other hand loves his vegetables and our daughter (minus the odd square of chocolate) prefers vegetables above anything else. But if vegetables become part of a great meal then it is amazing how many kids will actually eat it. Find yourself five recipes that in the kids’ minds are not eating vegetables and then gradually expand on it. I recommend for a starting base to start with a vegetable curry. That way they are eating a lot of amazing seasonal vegetables but their mind is transfixed on the sauce, the rice that you’re serving it with and the mix of flavours. Then look at the soup making idea. You can put a whole range of vegetables into a soup, add a little cheese and they are sold on it because of the cheese element. What they don’t realise is that it is 90% vegetables and they are getting the best health kick of their lives. Have soup with your kids for supper three times a week and have it with some homemade or just bought crusty bread. Then it will feel like a treat worth having and you’d be amazed by how many kids with be back for seconds and thirds.
This brings us to this Podcasts Sponsor: For Podcast 2 of CT FM we wanted to bring to your attention the soup maker by Morphy Richards. If you want to get your kids eating healthy and want a simple way to produce vegetables on their plates each night then it doesn’t get any better than a soup maker. We use ours everyday. Not just for soup but for steaming vegetables, making smoothies and creating pie fillings. You can find out all about it at recipe this dot com forward slash soup maker.
Frugal Family Cooking I am all for Frugal cooking. We spend less than $300 a month on our grocery shopping. This includes nappies for our daughter, pet food for our three pets and everything that is needed to cook from scratch. I appreciate the cost of grocery shopping is probably a lot less than in America but I find its not about what you spend but how far you can stretch what you buy. Or buying things that are cheaper but without falling into the trap of processed foods. The first thing I find that works out like this is mince. We all love mince don’t we? I love meatballs, kebabs, cottage pie, spaghetti Bolognese, meatloaf and lasagne. But pork mince is a lot cheaper than beef mince and so much easier to cook with. Because it has a much softer texture due to the pork fat it means that it is much easier to make meatballs with and after a couple of weeks on the pork mince you won’t notice the difference.
From the maths point of view I discovered that buying pork instead of beef worked out at 40% cheaper. Also we buy it in 1 kilo packs (that is 2.2 pounds) and it can be divided up into four bags of mince for the freezer for future cooking. I even that have it in 250g portions can still be too much. We cooked vegetable ragu with it a couple of days ago and had a full portion leftover for our son for his pre-dinner. So next time you’re in the supermarket check out the pork prices and see how much you could save yourself. Also if you download the PDF of this Podcast we have direct links to our recipes using the Pork mince.
Round Up! Thanks for joining us in our Podcast and we look forward to sharing more of our cooking tips with you in the future.
Links & Resources Mentioned In This Podcast
How To Chop Up A Chicken Meatloaf Recipe Party Meatballs Recipe Thai Vegetable Curry Sausage Casserole Morphy Richards Soup Maker Review
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Thanks again for listening and best of luck with your cooking.
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