The Menu: 'Flavour bombs' are a home cook’s secret weapon to keep kids eating

My children taught me that a new flavour had to be surrounded by a posse of old favourites

Ivo Duarte’s new Cork-based food business Sauer opens up a whole new flavour spectrum for the home cook. Picture: Miki Barlok

A new acquaintance was berating herself for a perceived failure to keep delivering “enough flavour” to ensure her teenage brood remained well fed, despite having “all the cookbooks and being on top of all the latest food trends”. Incidentally, she presumed my profession meant my own progeny were unicorn children relishing even wildly exotic fare.

I demurred. My own kids were as idiosyncratic, random, and at times exasperating as any young human gradually coming to terms with flavours and what they liked, loved, or loathed, preferences regularly reversed in a single week.