Get your family hooked on fish

FOR a food that is so good for your health, as well as easy to cook, versatile and delicious, fish often gets a hard time - especially from youngsters.

harry with fishy friends

FOR a food that is so good for your health, as well as easy to cook, versatile and delicious, fish often gets a hard time - especially from youngsters.

Kids will claim it is yucky, smelly and bony. It's not uncommon for their parents to say the same thing.

Throw in the rising cost of most local fish, and the fact it can be hard to buy fresh in some areas, and the recommendation that we eat two to three serves a week can become problematic.

Supermarkets are doing their bit, opening seafood counters in many stores with a wider choice of fish and sealing fillets in "bake in the bag" packaging to make cooking even easier. Not that fish should be difficult. Frying a piece of salmon is no more difficult than a steak.

Chef/nutritionist Zoe Bingley-Pullin says oily fish such as salmon are the only real source (other than supplements) of the essential fatty acids and oils that are so good for us.

"The body requires oils that it can't produce itself," Zoe says. "The best and easiest way to get them is to have fish in our diets."

FISH AND KIDS

RESEARCHERS believe these oils help with neural and nervous system development from an early age, so including fish in your child's diet is vital.

Zoe recommends starting early and setting an example.

"Parents need to be role models," she says. "If they aren't eating fish it is going to be hard to make a child eat it."

The fish with the highest oil content sardines, mackerel, trout, salmon are also those that taste "fishier" a harder sell to non fish-eaters.

So Zoe suggests starting with milder-tasting fish such as snapper, flathead and barramundi, which have the important elements but not in the same concentration.

"It's a lot better than no fish at all," she says. "It can be a good starting point for kids.'

She says disguising fish in meals such as fish patties made with pumpkin, a pasta bake with grated veg or homemade fish fingers coated in wholemeal crumbs is much better for you than the commercial varieties.

FROZEN

FREEZING fish is fine, Zoe says, though it will lose some nutrients. Oilier fish freezes better than drier varieties.

Zoe suggests going once a month to the fish shop and having fish vacuum-packed in small packages before freezing.

TINNED

WITH a few tins in the cupboard, all that fishy goodness is always at hand.

Canned sardines are high in essential oils and by eating the bones you get the added benefit of calcium and glucosamine.

Salmon is also good but, as with all canned fish, Zoe says to watch out for additives. Canned tuna is a good source of protein but contains little fish oil.