Even as a child, nutritionist and chef Sarah Pound had an audience. “I used to set up an old-school camcorder, and I would line up my three sisters. They would be my audience members, and I’d do cooking shows for them. They had to sit there because I was the oldest,” she laughs. Now her online community, Wholesome by Sarah, numbers in the hundreds of thousands, advocating for simple, wholesome, and healthy food that’s easy to prepare. She has a cookbook of the same name, and her new cookbook, Family Food: Fuss-Free Family Meals to Make Weeknights a Breeze, is scheduled for release on 29th July.
Those early videos for her family might have been a rehearsal for her present career, but in between, she studied food and nutrition at university, worked as a teacher, worked in restaurants, and ran her own catering company. Now she delights in working from home, writing her books and recipes, gazing out the picture windows of her Mount Martha home over the bay to the You Yangs.
“I’ve cooked for as long as I can remember,” Sarah says, “I genuinely have a joy of cooking and food, but I also have a fascination and passion for understanding how. How food can actually fuel your body—and how cool that is. What’s sad is I think a lot of people; often females, develop such an unhealthy relationship with food, with a lot of restrictions and completely depriving themselves of certain foods.”
Sarah’s catering business, Two Pounds, ran into trouble during Covid, as so many did, and that’s when she returned to the cooking videos she’d made as a kid. Pregnant with her second child, Penny, and with her older daughter Lily as a toddler, she invested in a DSLR camera that she couldn’t really afford. With the help and encouragement of her husband, Tom, she started posting her recipes on Instagram. Tom and Sarah have since welcomed their youngest daughter, Elia.
“I was quite gobsmacked when people were finding them so valuable, these simple meals that I had cooked forever. I was getting all these comments from people saying, ‘Oh my gosh, cooked this last night. It was so amazing. My whole family ate it,’ and I thought, OK, well, this is really cool because people are finding this useful. I’m helping them.”
Sarah is also aware of the detrimental side of social media. She warns: “I say to be careful because anyone on social media can call themselves a nutritionist, you actually technically don’t need a degree. A dietitian is different. So while it’s amazing for lots of things like recipe creation and sharing, I think we also need to be really careful about the health messages that we receive online.”
Sarah’s new book, Family Food, puts the emphasis on quick, simple and healthy-ish (as much as possible) meals that take the pressure off parents. “I don’t know where we got into this mind shift, with people carrying so much mum-guilt and expectation on their shoulders about having to serve up a beautiful meal to their kids every night. But you’ve got young children, and you’re just trying to survive when they’re very young. It doesn’t have to be perfect, and that’s the same with you – chocolate, wine; you have to enjoy life. Restricting things like that and putting so much pressure on yourself to perform every night in the kitchen isn’t worth it for anyone. You can serve up whatever they like, whether it’s a cheesy pasta alongside some chopped veggies, or eggs on toast for dinner.”
Now, here’s the question you’ve all been waiting for. How do you get children to eat veggies? Sarah has very firm ideas about this, which she details in her new book. “Parents, especially mums, need to get our kids in the kitchen more. And that doesn’t mean cooking a whole 45-minute dinner from scratch. As I tell people, get them involved. That’s the starting point. It might just be saying, OK, let’s choose what we’re going to have for dinner this week before we go shopping. Let them have a bit of say in the decision-making. If they say, ‘Oh, I really like stir-fried chicken’, you write it down. Create your shopping list, and if you can, take them to the shops.” “You can easily Google age-appropriate kitchen tasks for kids, and you’ll find a whole list of things they can do at whatever age they are. It might be as simple as tearing herbs to start, or washing lettuce. As they get older, you can move on to chopping things.”
“There are plenty of little tricks I use. Don’t feel like you have to strictly follow a recipe. You can change things as needed. If you read a recipe and think, ‘Oh no, my kids don’t like zucchini’, it’s fine; you can swap it out for green beans or carrots or whatever else they enjoy.”
It can take 15 to 20 exposures for kids to start liking a particular food. So, my message is: hang in there, be patient.
“Here’s a handy trick for when they come home hungry from school or after sports and you think, ‘Oh my God, it’s going to take me half an hour to cook dinner.’ Chop up some veggie sticks, like cucumber, carrot, capsicum and celery, or fruit. Fruits are not the devil either—just have them ready in a container. Set them on a plate while you cook dinner. When they’re hungry, they might snack on them as you’re preparing food. While they may not eat all of them, it eases the pressure off dinner time.
“Remember, it can take 15 to 20 exposures for kids to start liking a particular food. So, my message is: hang in there, be patient, and don’t put too much pressure on mealtime.”
Does Sarah have a personal favourite dish? “It’s so hard. My favourite dish would probably be chicken schnitzel with something fresh on the side, such as sliced tomato, as my dad used to do it. Adding a fresh component like a cherry tomato, cucumber, rocket, and red onion salad works well. As simple as it is, you just can’t go wrong with chicken schnitzel.”
Family Food – Fuss-Free Family Meals to Make Weeknights a Breeze is out on July 29th.
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