If the figures are to be believed, there can scarcely be a parent in the country who doesn't own one of Annabel Karmel's cookery books. Over the past 15 years, Karmel has introduced a generation of parents to the joys of butternut squash puree.
Self-confessed Karmel devotee, Catherine Hanly, interviews the cookery guru to find out if she practices what she preaches.

You've just launched a range for Boots to help parents make fresh baby puree. What was the thinking behind it?
Jarred baby food has a shelf life of two years. Do you want to be eating something every day that's two years old? That says it all really. And to make jarred food last so long it has to be sterilised which means heating the food to a very high degree which destroys a lot of the nutrients as well as the taste.

So fresh baby puree is tastier as well as healthier?
Babies are quite easy to feed between six months and a year – it's a really good time, they usually eat more or less everything. After that they get quite fussy and difficult, because their life gets more interesting, they're more mobile so you’ve got to get your baby used to these foods early on.
There's this misconception about feeding babies – that you should give them fruit and vegetable purees for absolutely ages, when in fact from seven months you should be introducing meat, fish, chicken. But if you look at these jars, they're often just 10% meat – if that! Try and find a jar with salmon or any oily fish with all the fatty acids that are so important and you just can't.

Don't mums have enough on their plate, without having to cook fresh purees every day?
Well, when mums make fresh food for their babies, they want to make it in bulk because they don't want to be cooking it every day. The problem has been that ice-cube tray portions are too small, and they don't have covers on them so it's difficult to preserve the food to the best quality. So I designed silicon food cube trays, so it's really easy to get the food out.

It all sounds very time-consuming...
Not really, there's a lot of food you can quickly mash without cooking – such as banana, peach or avocado. All you need to do at the weekend is set aside maybe an hour, cook up the food and then freeze it in the trays. Most people have the time – it's really not that complicated.

How did you get started as a children's cookery writer?
My son wouldn’t eat jarred baby food and it was really difficult. I love to cook, so I just made his purees and would take them into the playgroup I was running. A lot of mums there were having similar problems, so I brought in the recipes for them to use. They loved them and said 'Why don't you write a book?' so that's how it all happened.

Were you the only person you knew cooking baby food from scratch?
Yes. I think now more people cook their children's meals than ever did but when I first went to find books on cooking for kids, the kind of recipes they had were poached and pureed liver. Why would a child want to eat something like that which had no taste?
There was this notion that babies only liked bland food, so I thought I'd find out if that was true. I had about twenty babies to experiment on in our playgroup and it turned out that they liked tasty food. So my books were quite different from advice that had been given to mums before. I said to sauté onions and garlic, to add herbs, to use vanilla with fruit – because you can't add salt you need to add something else to make it tasty.

So what's your philosophy on food?
It should be as fresh as possible. With fresh you don't get all that salt or saturated fat or monosodium glutamate that manufacturers put into packaged food. Three quarters of the saturated fat and salt that children eat comes through processed food. And nothing will taste as nice as something you make fresh. It's also a feel-good factor for mums and dads when they see their children enjoying the food they've made them. I like that and I should think that other parents would do.

You have a lot of cunning tricks to make kids eat food...
Children don't like messed up food where they can't identify what's in it or what sauce is in it. You have to use trickery – hide vegetables in the sauce. Mini portions are a good idea. If you're going to make shepherds pie make several portions in ramekins. It looks more attractive. A good way to make kids eat plenty of fruit is to make fresh fruit ice lollies - you can put a lot of goodness into lollies.

You've also written recipe books for older children.
I brought out an after-school meal planner this year and it became a bestseller within three weeks. I was really surprised but it obviously hit the spot. Children come home from school starving and that's your window of opportunity to get them to eat something healthy. The timing's important – the kids are starving, but most mums give their kids a packet of crisps because they don't have anything ready.
Take a few minutes during the day to make something during the day and put it in the fridge for when they come home from school. You can take an English muffin and toast it and then mix a tin of tuna with some crème fraiche, tomato ketchup and spring onion – that takes two seconds. Put grated cheese on top and put it under the grill and you have a tuna melt – it's so easy to do that instead of giving them rubbish.

We run a campaign called Back To The Table. Does your family eat together regularly?
I've got three teenagers and it's difficult enough to communicate with teenagers when we're all running around living busy lives. The one time when you're all together is around the dinner table. If you're not eating at the table then you're not communicating – it's not just a food issue, it's about knowing what's going on in each others' lives. If you don't eat together every night there's a special time like Sunday lunch or Friday night which is sacrosanct and that's when you have dinner with your family.

So what do you talk about at the dinner table?
I quite like doing what are the good things and bad things that happened to you this week. Everyone goes round the table and gives their comments. It's really good; people think all week about what they're going to say on Friday night. If you open up to your children and be honest and tell them when things go wrong in your life they realise that adults also have this vulnerability in their lives and are more likely to confide in you. It's a really good way to communicate.

• Back To The Table campaign
  
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