Kids Dish

Dirk Flinthart has been publishing short stories and books for many years now. He moved from Queensland to Tasmania some years ago, and he and I promptly founded the Invisible College, a Hobart-based writing group for people interested in writing speculative fiction. He also has the most hobbies and interests of just about anyone I know, in addition to being the primary carer for three small children (his wife Natalie is a GP). His excuses for not making it to meetings of the Invisible College are usually elaborate, fascinating, and utterly true. That he ever makes it at all is a miracle…

Dirk sent me the answers to this interview from the Internet room of the Avenue Hotel in Wanganui, NZ, on a rare family holiday.

KidsDish: Hi, Dirk. Let’s start with the basics. How many kids do you have, and what ages?

DF: Talleyn is six. Perran is almost four. Mieke is sixteen months.

KidsDish: How much influence do you have over the food they eat?

DF: Rather a lot. I do pretty much all the cooking, and the shopping. Of course, if Natalie thought I was doing badly, I’m sure she’d make some noise — but she
seems to approve, overall. And that’s good, because she can’t cook.

KidsDish: What are their favourite foods?

DF: Hmm. Talleyn adores pasta, and nasi goreng — Indonesian style fried rice, with spices and vegetables and little bits of chicken and prawn. Perran absolutely loves fish, and is extremely fond of sushi… and even sashimi, which is raw fish dipped in soy and spices. He has a weakness for chocolate, but makes up for it by eating lots of healthy stuff. Mieke is still too young to have a lot of preferences, but she likes all kinds of fruit, yoghurt, chicken, sausages, pasta, rice, carrots, and hot chips.

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

DF: No trouble at all. Let me repeat that: absolutely no trouble. There’s no trick to it. When they’re quite young — up to about two years old — you simply don’t present them with foods you don’t want them to eat, and you make sure that you provide plenty of nutritious and tasty snacks. Best is if you can set up a sort of self-dispensing system for things like apples and carrots. Both the boys were happily finding their own healthy snacks from their special drawer in the kitchen before they could even talk.

I know it sounds too good to be true, but it’s the real thing. Some people say that their kids will “only eat junk”. Well, after about age five or six, yeah — you’ve let them build habits that are very, very hard to break. But if you simply start young and present them with tasty, healthy foods… well, Natalie is a doctor, and she says she’s never, ever heard of a two-year-old starving themselves. You just have to be more patient and stubborn than your kids.

It really does help to start young, though. Talleyn’s first solid food was avocado. I used to make his baby food for him: blended rice with salmon, coriander, lemon, spring onion and just a pinch of salt — that was a favourite. People who came visiting us used to take whatever was leftover and spread it on their toast… which made me laugh.

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

DF: I just like cooking. Family? Well, they’re the usual audience, yeah. But I flat-out like cooking. It’s an art form: you have the skill base, the artist, the medium (food!) the actual creation, and the appreciative audience. I’m practiced enough now that I like to create something brand new for Natalie’s birthday every year. This year, I used my ice-cream maker to create leatherwood honey-mascarpone ice cream, which I froze till it was hard. Then I scooped out little balls which I rolled in gingernut crumbs, and served. Yeah!

In general, though, cooking is fun. I like working with Thai, Malay, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Japanese and Mediterranean ingredients and techniques. I’m far from expert in any of those styles, but I know enough about most of them to create interesting cross-over dishes… prawns, dressed in lime, chilli and coriander, then wrapped in fillo pastry and baked; smoked salmon served with a salsa of avocado, spring onion, cucumber, capsicum, soy sauce, sushi vinegar, lime juice and a little palm sugar, all placed on a bed of crispy-fried potato shavings.

You get the idea.

KidsDish: What’s your breakfast routine?

DF: Breakfast is higgledy piggledy. As a writer, I have to work late at night. Natalie usually gets her own breakfast, and puts out some toast for Perran. Mieke eats a bit of whatever Natalie has. Talleyn is addicted to cold cereal — he likes Uncle Toby’s Oat Flakes. Once Natalie goes to work and Talleyn goes to school, Perran usually gets a second course — avocado toast, or maybe some porridge. I use muesli to make porridge, because I find plain oats boring as hell. My own breakfast is usually pretty simple: toast with beans, or muesli, or fruit, or some sort of mix of the lot. I’ve never been a big breakfast person.

KidsDish: Do any of your kids cook, or prepare food? If so, what sort of food can they prepare?

DF: Talleyn and Perran are both too young to do a lot of food prep, particularly as I keep my knives wickedly sharp. However, they both enjoy helping me prepare sushi, and pizza, and Perran in particular loves mixing stuff and rolling things. We make biscuits together now and then. I bought him a little rolling pin and a bunch of biscuit cutters for Christmas…

KidsDish:. Do you ever feel guilty about what you feed your kids?

DF: On occasion. Seriously: I sit down, and we’re eating maybe Indonesian-style fried rice, or perhaps san choy bau, or maybe won-ton soup with home-made dumplings and stock… maybe a fresh blueberry cobbler for dessert, or perhaps a salad of different melons dressed with ginger syrup and mint, and I think: what are these poor kids going to think when they get around to eating away from home? How are they going to handle meat-and-three-veg?

But then I have to go out for an evening, and Natalie cooks sausages and noodles… and they eat it all, so I figure they’ll survive.

Actually, I mostly feel proud. I am utterly delighted that three-year-old Perran will face up to Turkish-style stuffed vine leaves like he did tonight… didn’t like them, but he tried them. And Talleyn? He loved them. Ate two, as well as his Turkish “Chicken Iskander”. (We were at a Turkish foodery.)

The best bit comes when my small children start chowing down, without so much as blinking, on foods that a lot of adults I know are afraid to try. We had a medical student in our house last week. He took pictures of Perran, who was eating the leftover part of the Chinese Cabbage (wombok) that I’d used to prepare Spring Rolls. He couldn’t believe he was watching a three-year-old eating raw cabbage…

KidsDish: What’s your favourite vegetable?

DF: Oooh. Tough call. Umm… I really like spring onions, for the flavour. Zucchini is versatile, but it’s technically a fruit (like melons, pumpkins and
eggplant.) Carrots are incredibly satisfying to crunch, and very tasty. Lettuce is a little bland, but you can use it for all kinds of things.

Nope. I can’t pick a favourite.

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

DF: Nearly forty-one years old. Married, three kids. I write stories (and occasionally books), cook a lot, and teach ju-jitsu. I play flute and Irish whistle, and I keep trying to play harp, but my harp has narrow string-settings, and my fingers aren’t the most delicate and slender.

I live in northeast Tasmania, and I love all the fresh fruit, the fish, and the game meat I can get there. I don’t ever want to run a restaurant, but I like eating in good ones.

KidsDish: Thanks for taking part in this interview!