So you guys, I was surprised by the comments on my last post-- I had thought there was lots of vegetable stealth out there. (Melanie B., are you reading this? Don't you hide beets in chocolate cake occasionally?) I asked my mother for her opinion, which was a loud harrumph: she thinks the boy in question owes me an apology and not the other way around. I think he may have been embarrassed that he had kicked up such a fuss about zucchini being unsuitable for human consumption, and then had eaten it blithely, untroubled by its presence in the chili.
I did apologize, because I would be mad if the shoe were on the other foot and because it is a dangerous precedent to tell your kids that partial truth-telling is A-OK if it gets you what you want.
Tonight at dinner they grouped vegetables into categories A, B, and C. Category A includes the vegetables they eat pretty much plain without complaints: carrots, peas, beans, broccoli, celery, asparagus, potatoes. Category B includes vegetables they'll eat if they're slightly disguised (chopped up finely, or part of quiche or soup or something): kale, chard, spinach, tomatoes, cauliflower, parsnips, rutabaga, beets, radishes, cole slaw, pumpkin. Category C is the Vegetables of Doom: eggplant, zucchini, summer squash. (These are not the more exhaustive lists they came up with at dinnertime, just the bits I can remember without going into the kitchen to retrieve the paper on which I wrote it all down.)
They also told me that the more vegetables there are in a given meal, the more likely they are to get grumpy about vegetables. This is a commonsense comment, but it sparked a little inner "oh yeah" moment. I think I may have gone too far in my anti-white-flour zeal. If they eat pasta salad with olives and tomatoes willingly, they will consume more vegetables than if I put a little dish of olives and tomatoes in vinaigrette on the table and it goes untouched. "Pasta salad!" they said, when I mentioned this at the table. "We like pasta salad!"
So. They are reasonably good eaters, I think. They have reasonably similar tastes, so that I don't have to worry about turning into a short-order cook if I try to accommodate kid preferences more often. I think I ought to make meals a little less vegetable-heavy, with a little less focus on eating seasonal foods here in eggplant/zucchini/tomato season.If you're local and you need some zucchini, I can hook you up.
This morning I noticed that the zucchini plant that had produced most consistently was near death: yellow leaves, moldy stem, lots of little bites missing from the maturing fruit. (I wondered for a moment if BWMNBN had slipped outside and peed on it.) When I reported its demise at dinner, there were cheers.
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