Louise Fulton Keats' newest cookbook

Family meals can be adapted for babies and toddlers - such as pea and prawn risotto with garlic, spring onion and mint. Black coconut rice. Quinoa chicken rissoles. Even mussel fritters. It's about healthy eating for everyone to set up good habits for life and minimise time spent in the kitchen preparing "kids' meals".

"We have to undo this perception that there's kids' food and there's adult food," food writer and author Louise Fulton Keats said. "If you can start giving family meals to your baby - including garlic, ginger and cinnamon - from six months they're more likely to accept those flavours at three and five. We now know there's a crucial period for flavour learning in the first 12 months that follows through to the toddler years and shapes a child's taste, potentially for the rest of their life.

"The problem is that if you're going to prepare something separate for baby or toddler, it's more likely to be white and have no spices because you're pandering to a fussy eater. I understand that because I have a four-year-old but the reality is if you can push through that - and all the research shows the best way is to just keep offering the food - it will be accepted in the end. As parents that's hard to do but it is really crucial not to just give packet baby food."

Fulton Keats is a natural, drawing on her grandmother Margaret Fulton's inspiration for some of the recipes in her fourth book, Something for Everyone, which is packed with tips on baby and toddler nutrition.

Childhood favourites, such as pancakes, pikelets and crepes, are all there - with a twist because Fulton Keats uses olive oil instead of butter, adds an extra egg or some ground nuts for a nutritional boost and cuts out refined white sugar in her sweet treats. Instead, she uses rapadura - dried sugarcane juice which retains its molasses content - maple syrup and fruit.

Not that rapadura is a health food. Fulton Keats is quite clear on that and suggests if you can't afford it or don't want to clock up food miles because it's imported, go conventional. Just minimise how much you use across the board because the more sweetness young palates have, they more they like it.

Best of all, Fulton - who turned 90 last month - is her biggest fan.

"Yes, Margaret would have used butter," Fulton Keats said. "I always joked she had butter with her bread, not the other way round, but then portion sizes were smaller in her day and people cooked more at home, so in many ways they were probably better off. When I gave her a copy of the book, she sat and really scrutinised every page for about an hour.

"She was quiet through the whole process but very congratulatory at the end. She's always been open-minded and progressive and she's delighted the whole family has followed her into food, even though being a cook, as she was in the 1940s, didn't have any prestige."

A former lawyer with a degree in paediatric nutrition, Fulton Keats is expecting her second child in March and is immersed in food these days with a series of columns in magazines. Her mother, Suzanne Gibbs, is a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu cookery school in London and former food editor of the BBC Australian Good Food magazine. Sister Kate Gibbs is a food journalist.

Fulton Keats is big on family dinners because that's the way she was brought up, with studies now showing that the rapport a shared meal creates has a flow-on effect for children's mental health and wellbeing. The book is full of beautiful happy snaps, with her best friend's baby son, Davin, vying for centre stage with Fulton-Keats' son, Harry.

"Coming from a legal background, I know what it's like," she said. "You get home at 7pm and the thought of cooking something for baby, then your husband and maybe yourself is exhausting. That's why people turn to takeaway; their spirits are broken. It takes me a lot of time and I'm a food writer. So it makes sense for children to eat a family meal.

"The social aspect of it can't be underestimated, particularly in the teenage years. These children are less likely to suffer from eating disorders, they're less likely to take drugs, they're less likely to abuse alcohol, they're less likely to suffer from depression and they're less likely to attempt suicide."

• Something for Everyone ($39.95 softcover) is published by Hardie Grant Books. *

'We now know there's a crucial period for flavour learning in the first 12 months that follows through

to the toddler years.'