I love vegetables, & good thing since I am supposed to eat so many of them. My children do not. They only like a few. And to make a challenge even more interesting, they do not even like the same few. My oldest child's favorite vegetables are potatoes & corn. Even though I have explained to her numerous times that these process more like grains & other carbs, she holds fast to her claim that they count. My younger one thinks that green beans are the only cooked vegetable worth eating, however, she will eat the tomato chunks in a chili or spaghetti sauce, unlike her sister, who can throw a tantrum or give a 45 minute dissertation of just how disgusting they are.
Once upon I time I had children that ate whatever was put in front of them. From spicy Cajun rice & andouille (at 7 months old when she was too young to eat it, my first child begged, open-mouthed like a baby birdie for my Cajun rice) to sauerkraut-topped hot dogs, from Chinese stir-fried anything to a spinach salad....I remember her cutting some teeth with a jalapeno ring, chewing the same one all day.
I took pride in how curious they were to try new things. They were real food- adventurers! I liked being the envy of friends & family who thought it so unfair that my children were so open when I was such a picky eater.
And then one day, I don't know what day, something changed. Unbeknownst to their father & me, without so much as a warning, one of them decided that variety at dinner was coming to an end. I don't like green beans. Eeew, tomato chunks! Ugh... Onions. Mushrooms are nasty. I hate peas!
Ok, I hate peas too. But my kids liked them at one point so I bought them & made them & hoped they never noticed that I didn't eat them. They also liked sweet potatoes, which neither my husband nor I have a taste for, but we made them. I'd even choke them down to try to be a good example because they're good for us.
All of a sudden, raw was the way to go- as long as it could be eaten with peanut butter, caramel sauce or ranch dip, we were still in business. Then fruit too became an issue. It was a medium for growing science experiments rather than nutrition. You want me to eat the skin on the apple? Can you peel my orange for me & make sure to get ALL the white stuff off? The little seeds are icky! See ya later strawberries & kiwis. I don't like that peaches fuzzy. No, it's that I don't like eating around a pit. Bye-bye nectarines & plums.
We never subjected them to my husband's least favorite (rutabaga) or mine (okra.) I know you want to laugh because you thought it was peas. Nope. They're nasty, but if they are few & far between, I won't gag if I accidentally eat one, but okra? Yeah, that'll ruin everything for me. Let me explain: I love vegetable soup. My darling husband thought he was going to give me a shortcut one day when I was making it & bought a bag of frozen vegetables labelled 'soup mix' or something like that. It had okra in it. I never had okra before, but was not very interested in trying it either. I'd heard it could be slimy. I'm a textural eater. That's why I don't like mushrooms, so... I used the bag figuring that with everything in there, one thing couldn't stand out too much. Wrong. I do not like okra. No, ma'am.
So peas are done with, mushrooms are out, sweet potatoes are relegated to Thanksgiving & nobody feels the pain. Then my husband starts pureeing the tomato sauce to appease the tomato-chunk objection. Then I start chopping the onions large so they can scoot them off to the side. No green beans? That's ok, we'll have broccoli. I peel & slice apples in no time flat. Orange 'smile' wedges please them.
Then we notice, all the caramel dip is gone, but they've not eaten 1/2 an apple. The ranch dip is gone, but there are still 6 baby carrots on the plate. And now, one of them is claiming she no longer likes peanut butter. That's just unAmerican!
So we tried to do some sneaky things. We'd hide little bits of spinach in the lasagna. I'd put carrot shreds along with the onions & celery into the turkey meatloaf. We started eating a lot of Mexican-style dishes to trick them into believing that the vegetables were only the spices & seasonings. Jalapenos & green chilies, all peppers were tolerable & onion so small it disappeared along with smooth tomato sauces & salsas became our mainstays. And we could throw in corn, corn & more corn. BORING!
So I read recipes. I look on the internet & I read magazines & I try to find items my family will eat, ways to bump up the nutrition, especially for the kids who won't eat the 2 sides of veggies that I do. Looking through a 'diabetic' cookbook, I found a recipe for stuffed peppers. It supposedly was a better option than the recipe we've always made because it bumped up the fiber while reducing the glycemic load, sodium, & sugar. Can't hurt to try, right? We like stuffed peppers.
This recipe called for tomato sauce (I think it was a specific brand that was low sodium & low sugar- you'd be shocked how much sugar is hiding in your tomato products, by the way!) It called for a high-fiber cereal, crushed, to replace the rice one usually uses. The rest is pretty much the same.
I wanted to like it. I want to eat healthy food. OMG! Nothing can make that concoction edible. I still laugh when I remember my husband's face. He took the first bite. We all took a bite. It had the taste & texture of wet sawdust. I could not detect tomato, pepper or meat. Just warm, wet pasty stuff that got grittier as I chewed. I used all my determination to move the mess to the back of my mouth & swallow. Every fiber (ha!) of my being wanted to spit it out. I fought against my gag reflex. I looked back at the expectant faces waiting for me to speak. Now I know how Mikey felt....only I didn't like it.
I told my husband to offer the dinner, & I use the term loosely, to his parents. Maybe they could convince themselves they liked it, as they often did that with bland & tasteless foods because they are supposed to be healthy. It';s been about 2 years & there is still laughter about these awful peppers. That's cruel to the peppers though. It wasn't their fault the dish was horrible.
And we've decided to cook what we like & shout over the complaints.
Ha! I, too, have waved goodbye to the veggies. And my kids like different veggies each, same as yours. Remember the 70s? "you'll eat what you get and like it, kid!"
ReplyDelete