6 tips to inspire your kids to eat bone broth

When I was growing up in Soviet Ukraine, we had some sort of broth based soup everyday. It was normally a clear soup with bits in it, not the puréed type popular in the West. I ended up losing this habit completely once I set off on my own. Only a few years ago I discovered the scientific reasons for why broth should be one of the pillars of a nourishing diet. All traditional societies value the nutrition that can be ‘unlocked’ from within the bones. ‘Nourishing traditions’ is the book that convinced me go back to our family traditions.

Bone broth is anti-inflammatory, promotes healthy bones, teeth, joints, nails and hair. It heals the gut and helps us to absorb nutrients from food. This post by Dr. Mercola gives you a scientific and a fascinating historical background for why bone broth is ‘A Most Nourishing Food for Virtually Any Ailment’.

I’ve written about how and why to make a rich beef bone broth. Now I would like to share with you the fun ways to get your kids to love it, ways that worked and continue to work for us. My daughter asks for chicken stock for breakfast some times and always when she is under the weather. She knows that it makes her strong, this is a mantra we repeat regularly.

1. Cut fun shapes from crunchy veg and offer your kiddo to go ‘fishing’ in the stock. I use mini stainless steel cookie cutters like these. They work really well with carrots, kohlrabi, cucumber (with skin or even just skin, otherwise can be too soft), bell pepper, daikon radish, beetroot, turnip etc. In the video below my daughter is not yet 3, maybe showing this clip to your kids can help inspire them to try this fun way of eating stock.

Cutting shapes from carrots

2. Miso soup DIY dinner

This is such a popular dinner with my daughter. She loves to compose her own soup, sprinkle herbs, mix it together, drink the stock through a straw and then eat the rest with a spoon – depending on her mood.

Its very easy when you have some stock made and some cooked meat, but of course it can also be meat free. I almost always have some organic frozen prawns, leftover roast chicken or other cooked meat such as beef tongue or pork shoulder.

We love all kinds of colourful ‘sprinkles’, all in separate small bowls around a bowl of stock:

spring onions, coriander, sour dough croutons, omelette strips, cooked meat, peas, soaked seaweed, prawns, carrot spaghetti, fried onions, cucumber.

Miso soup DIY dinner

3. Why not try broth as a drink, camping /forest drink or a first course? Mix warmed up broth with a little miso paste or traditionally fermented soy sauce (Tamari) or coconut aminos and offer to drink it up with funky straws from a wide variety of vessels. Miso adds bean pieces which can be seen floating up a transparent straw, bombilla filters bits out leaving them to be eaten with a spoon. Sometimes my little one likes to drink from a tiny coffee cup, sometimes from a Chinese bowl and lately the favourite thing is chicken stock on the go from an insulated flask!

Enjoying broth with a bombilla!

Kids broth equipment

4. Cook pasta and rice in chicken or beef stock by absorption method: instead of boiling a full pan of water, heat up some chicken stock so it would just covers the amount of pasta or rice you want to cook. Cook slowly, so that most of the stock is absorbed. Pasta cooked this way would take around the double cooking time stated on the packet, rice would cook in the same time as by absorption method with water, but will be much tastier!

Then use rice or pasta as you normally would – put bone broth based sauce on it, make fried rice with meat and vegetables and eggs, or just sprinkle some cheese/herbs/ butter. The flavour is already there, pasta and rice cooked this way don’t need much ‘help’.

This  handful of pasta  I made recently for my daughters lunch has ‘absorbed’ 500 ml of beef bone broth. Part of the broth was indeed absorbed and the rest was reduced by further twenty minutes on the hob without the lid. The result is sticky, rich, meaty sauce. This time I added some shredded slow cooked beef shoulder:

Pasta cooked in bone broth: as soupy or as dry as you like

5. Make sauces with broth: if the sauce is liked and gobbled up , your kid would get a decent broth serving just having the sauce on meat, pasta or vegetables. My girls favourite sauce is fried onion, fried grated carrot (fried in ghee or tallow), cooked until soft in broth, blended until smooth with crème fraiche (recipe coming soon!). Its really yummy, quite sweet because of the caramelised onions and carrots, thick and creamy. Add some tomato paste and you have a nourishing tomato sauce!

6. Warm up some chicken stock: or beef broth for yourself, add some salt, chilli and a splash of something acidic: lemon juice, vinegar (or a splash of master tonic if you have made it) and drink it yourself. If you enjoy it, you will find many more ways to get your kids to like it.

My broth propaganda paid off – Katherine specified ‘chicken stock’ as her favourite food in her birthday questionnaire at school!