Kids Dish

Callisto Shampoo has a blog at http://callistra.livejournal.com/

KidsDish: Hi Calli! How many kids do you have, and what ages?

Calli: I have one 18 month old little boy, Vinnie.

KidsDish: How much influence do you have over the food he eats?

Calli: I’d say about 95% control, maybe even higher, but I don’t interfere
when he’s at Mum’s place for dinner. There’s nothing she has given him
yet that would make me worry.

KidsDish: What are his favourite foods?

Calli: Bananas. Bananas. Oh, and another banana thanks. He ate three today.

KidsDish: Do you have trouble getting him to eat healthy food, like fruit
and vegetables? What methods have you developed to encourage him
towards healthy food?

Calli: He loves his fruit, so I try to make sure there’s fruit after his
lunchtime sandwich, and fruit as snacks too. At this stage, we put the
food in front of him, and he tends to feed himself. He likes steamed
rice, broccoli usually gets eaten, and as most of our meals tend to
focus more on vegies than anything else, he usually can’t avoid too
many of them. I always give him little bits of vegies that I am
chopping up for dinner, just because he likes it. He usually eats
them, too!

He also likes figs, mango, watermelon, rockmelon, chocolate, apples,
pears, but he is less enthusiastic about the veg. He did start eating
a potato the other day (raw) but I don’t think he bothered to finish
that.

He gets the same food as us now, I think he often doesn’t like it if
we have different food. I sometimes steal a bite of his dinner, and
sometimes feed him from my plate. He’s always been a really good
feeder. If he can grab a handle on it, he will stuff it into his gob.
Whether it stays in there is a different thing though. He also likes
spaghetti. He swallows it and then grabs hold of the end and pulls it
back out and then swallows it again and … yeah.

We eat at the table about 9 out of ten times, and he eats in his high
chair with us. He has sat on chairs and had his dinner before without
even a cushion, and he is very good at sitting and eating.

KidsDish: Do you enjoy cooking for your family? What are some of your
favourite things to prepare?

Calli: I love cooking, and can cook reasonably well in Indian, Thai, Chinese
and Japanese. I love to cook a proper stir fry, and get a real kick
out of making good wok hay flavours. My husband and I love love love
egg plant, so we go through one large or two small every week.
Szechuan style eggplant is good, there’s indian style eggplant dishes
I do, I can make good noodles most of the time, I love my
crockpots…. I can talk about any part of food preparation, cooking,
style, anything until the cows come home. And I can talk about
growing vegies and chickens too….

KidsDish: What’s your breakfast routine?

Calli: I sleep as much as possible. Oh, you mean *breakfast* routine. OK.
Vinnie wakes up at about 6:45, and J usually looks after him while I
doze. V gets a bottle and usually porridge, with some tinned or fresh
fruit mixed through, or else shares toast with jam or vegemite with J.
I get up eventually and stare blankly at my emails while I drink
brewed coffee and wake up. I will often have a late breakfast of
toast, 2 minute noodles, or fruit.

KidsDish: (so jealous! I want that breakfast routine!) Vinnie’s probably a bit young for this, but can he cook, or prepare food? If so, what sort of
food can he prepare?

Calli: He can wave capsicum around while going “oooo!” Does that count? I
intend for him to be involved in the cooking process, and if need be
then he can beat an egg and I will find a way to use it in the meal…
I think too many people are just so divorced from the food they eat,
so my plan is to have him aware of what I am doing and why, and also
getting the eggs from the chickens and knowing where eggs come from
and where chicken meat comes from too. I buy my vegies from a local
vegetable shop and buy my meat from a local butcher. I’m putting
together a garden, and V already loves coming out to help me water and
play in the veg. I expect that even if he doesn’t like cooking, he
will have a good repetoire of skills in the kitchen by the time he
leaves home.

KidsDish: Do you ever feel guilty about what you feed Vinnie?

Calli: I feel guilty when I open a tin of food for him. Usually this is
prompted by time constraints rather than food constraints, but I do
serve prawns occasionally and I haven’t tested him for allergies to
prawns, and I have no intention of doing so for a very long time yet.
Other than that, no.

KidsDish: What’s your favourite vegetable?

Calli: It is ze eggy plant. Pumpkins. Er. I like vegies. I love pumpkin, and
I am hanging out to get my hands on some Australian Butter from
Diggers seed club. I also want their mixed pumpkin set, which includes
Turks Turban pumpkins, Australian Butter, and all sorts of weirdo
pumpkins. I’m excited! We love eggplant, the myriad of ways we can
cook with it and it’s taste. That took a bit of practice to cook
properly, if you do it wrong you end up with mush or hard blocks.

KidsDish: And finally, tell us a little about yourself.

Calli: I never quite know what to say at this sort of point. Which part of me
would you like to know about? I love to cook, and love having the
time to do so. I have two crockpots, a rice cooker, a sandwich press,
two blenders, a food processor, a kenwood chef, a sontaku knife, a
bbq, a weber, two cast iron hotplates, a cast iron fry pan, two
not-chinese style clay pots, three woks though I only use one, 6
burners, an oven which is 74 centimetres from inside to inside, and
love to watch Good Eats, an American cooking show by Alton Brown, who
I think is kind of sexy. I am a raving feminist who believes in
choice, education, and family. I love to organize and run things,
camping is going to be so exciting I can’t wait to start making lists.

Oh, and I’m ambivalent about going out for dinner because I can often
cook better than a lot of resturaunts. *grin*

Really, I just like food!

KidsDish: Thanks for doing this interview, Callisto Shampoo!