Don’t overcook the veggies!! You’ll kill them.

I’m not talking about your kids, but about the vegetable’s taste and nutrition. I’m not a raw foodist, but I definitely see their point. The more heat applied to a vegetable, the more nutrients that are lost. Also, overcooked vegetables taste like poop – excuse the language.
If you can serve the vegetable raw, that will provide the most nutrition to your child. And even if you don’t like the vegetable raw, your kids may. See my earlier post about my son eating kale and bok choy raw.

If you are going to cook the vegetable, pay attention to it. There are so many times that I get involved with taking care of some argument among the kids or cooking the other parts of the meals, that I forget about the vegetable. I open the lid to the pan and it’s a dark green pile of mush. Shoot! Those are the nights that we have raw dinosaur leaves as our vegetable.

I find that most vegetables only take a few minutes to cook. I always tell my husband, who usually takes care of the meat dish, to give me a 10 minute warning when the meal will be ready. Most vegetables do not take more than that. For instance, I will steam kale for about 10 minutes and then do a quick sauté in sesame oil and a little soy sauce. We steam broccoli for about 5 minutes and it comes out a beautiful green with a little crunch to it. Yum!

Whatever vegetable you are cooking should still be a bright color after it cooks (bright green, orange, red, etc.). If it has started to lose its color, it has probably started to lose its nutrients, too.

A vegetable by any other name...

OK. So now you've bought organic, local, seasonal vegetables to serve. You've cooked them (I'll post some recipes later), but your kids still won't eat them! Uggghhh! Does anyone else get extremely frustrated when you cook a delicious, healthy meal and your kids take one bite and say they are full? That is one of my biggest pet peeves. More on that later with troubleshooting.

So what do you do? My next few entries will be sharing my techniques that I've used with my children. Many of them I have shared with friends who have tried them on their children. So these are tried and true methods.

Here's my favorite and tends to work really well:

Make up a story around the vegetable. If you've read my first entry in the blog (or seen the title, "Dinosaur Leaves," you'll understand where I'm coming from). Kids have wonderful imaginations. If you make believe the vegetables are something else, they love it. For instance, any kind of leafy greens are dinosaur leaves. My son loves dinosaurs and we made up a story that this is what the dinosaurs ate. Since he loves to pretend to be a dinosaur, he loves to eat the "dinosaur leaves."

Now I warn you, sometimes it doesn't work as well as you'd like. One night my husband made a delicious spinach soup, but it was green and creamy. Our kids have a hard time with soups. There is something about the consistency that they don't like. So I knew it was a long shot that they would eat it, but I thought I'd try. So I told them that the soup was monster boogers. Of course, that made them all smile and groan. But they were all curious of how it would taste. I think my son maybe had three bites and my daughters one each. But had I not made that up, the kids would have automatically said "I don't like this" and not even tried it. Later on I'll talk about having your kids try a vegetable 10 times before you can determine that they really don't like it. So I have one down for spinach soup. Nine more to go.

Other foods and stories that I've made up:

1. Beets - If you have girls (or boys that like lipstick), this is a great game. During the spring and fall we get a ton of beets in our veggie share. I love them and my husband hates them. But I can't eat them all, so I recruit my little ones to help. Because they are so sweet and very nutritious, I wanted to encourage my kids to eat them. I told my daughters that the can use the beets as lipstick. They jumped on this and we had red beet kisses all dinner long. My son joined in also.
2. Romaine leaves - Sometimes I don't have enough time to do a warm vegetable at dinner, so I'll serve lettuce. Rather than chop it up as a salad, I keep the romaine leaves whole and serve them as bunny ears. I usually throw in a carrot, too. This works really well around Easter.
3. Broccoli can be dinosaur trees.
4. Brussels Sprouts are dinosaur cabbages.
5. Shredded carrots are hay stacks or treasure hunt covers.
6. Asparagus are tiny swords
7. Pea pods are cannons with little cannon balls in them - make sure no one loses an eye with this one.

After using this technique for a while, you'll notice that you may not need to "name" the vegetable any more. My kids are so used to eating broccoli and spinach that I don't need to play a game to get them to eat these. They love them and will eat them un-coerced. This also proves my theory that kids will develop the taste for vegetables, like them, and choose to eat them (rather than being forced).

Next entry: To Spice or Not To Spice (I'm not a big Shakespeare fan, but the titles seem to fit)