Great international array of food for babies and young children

With our family background and mix of cultures I'm rather proud (in a good way I hope) to say that I try to introduce a good range of international food in the family. Chinese food surprisingly doesn't feature too much in my daily repertoire, but yes we do do Asian food - Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, Korean, Indian (British curry really...), European - we like Spanish, 'Italian' as far as I am able to replicate at home, and some Ecuadorean dishes. There's a firm family favourite of ours, a lebanese eatery, that's made us go back time and time again. It's all got easier since our older boy grew out of his baby allergies (egg, fish, dairy), thank God, and he does have strange tastes, such as lemon juice, and he did put an awful lot of black pepper with the pepper mill this evening when we were sampling the spaghetti carbonara I've just mentioned in the last blog post.

At E's nursery every parent does a shift on a regular basis and I love the idea. At times we have a 'food' shift, which involves preparing a snack and a lunch (main course and dessert) for 15 young children and 3-4 adults at a time. With different parents comes different cooking styles and we (in the vast majority) try to cook healthy food from scratch. Vegetarian food is served and we do have to make allowances for food preferences and allergies of the children in attendence, and this process has really challenged me to make up great vegetarian recipes that both children and adults would like, including using ingredients like quorn (not as bad as I thought it'd be), polenta and quinoa, the South American Andean grain.

Our local children's centre is offering healthy cooking classes to emphasise the importance of lowering salt and sugar content and using spices and natural ingredients instead to flavour your family cooking. I'll be looking forward to join those next month. Let me do all the cooking, and I'll be a happy woman as long as the dishwasher is in perfect working order!