For those working all hours, making sure your child gets a balanced diet can often be a bind. It doesn’t need to be that way. Preparing meals that are healthy but also edible can be done with a little imagination.

The key is getting children to eat fruit and vegetables. Soups are good, because you can cram in loads. Baked beans – despite coming out of a can – should also form part of the cheating mother’s armoury. Half a tin counts as one of the five recommended portions of fruit and veg a day. Make sure you go for the reduced salt versions.

Younger children are often guided by colour. You can appeal to girls’ love of all things pink by mashing beetroot in with potatoes to change the colour. Celeriac can be mashed in, to get in an extra vegetable without children noticing.

Simple changes can be made to everyday meals to make them more healthy. When making spaghetti bolognese, use extra-lean organic beef to cut down on fat. Use wholemeal spaghetti too. Waitrose seems to be alone in selling a type that doesn’t taste of cardboard, and the kids won’t notice.

Homemade versions of fast food can appeal to childish palates. Homemade hamburgers, again using extra lean beef, are not difficult. Fish cakes are also easy to knock-up, using salmon fillets, potato and herbs.

For dessert, low-fat yoghurts come into their own. Fresh fruit is about as good as it gets, and should be used much more than fruit juices, which often have high levels of sugar. Janine Fahri is a nutritional therapist at the NutriLife Clinic, West London.

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