Give it a new name

Something we've learned from the television program Charlie and Lola is that sometimes, if you're very lucky, by giving a food a funny name you can get your child to try it, maybe even eat it.

I can't remember having to do this kind of thing very much when Mars was little, but Venus likes to randomly give up whole food groups for periods of time ranging from one meal to two months, so some nights we try everything we can to get her to eat.

Anyway we started off by using the names that Charlie uses to get Lola to eat certain foods. He calls fish fingers ocean nibbles, carrots become orange twiglets from the planet Jupiter, peas are green drops, cherry tomatoes are moon squirters and mashed potato is cloud fluff from the top of Mount Fuji.

We've taken to calling various shapes of pasta by new and interesting names. Penne are tubes, macaroni are rainbows, gnocchi are pillows and tortellini are belly buttons. Broccoli has become green trees and cauliflower is white trees (although my children won't eat it no matter what I call it), and potato gems (or pommes as they are sometimes called) are now known as dinosaur eggs.

Recently X-Man's mum made some fantastically delicious apple and raspberry crumble and very kindly brought some over to our house. So that night when we were all finished with dinner and were waiting for Venus to finish so we could have dessert, I heard myself say the words "Venus, if you eat all of your dinosaur eggs you can have some gruffalo crumble."

Sadly, she didn't eat her gruffalo crumble. Happily, I got to eat it for her.