Monday Nutrition Tip of the Week

Look at this face:

Sugar and spice and all things nice, right? Well, just try putting a vegetable on this girl's plate at dinner.

Corn? Puh-lease. I am not eating that.

Try to force the issue? Here's what you get:

Mom, why must you ruin my life? 

This girl is tough as nails and sharp as a tack when it comes to vegetables. Every night I put a few peas, a couple carrots, or a small pile of sweet potatoes on her plate, and every night it goes untouched. I can dress it up, dress it down, mix it with something, put chocolate on it...she will not touch it. She can smell healthy from a mile away. I can safely say that since she started feeding herself, no green food has ever (knowingly) passed her lips.

Here is something I do not understand: I can place a vegetable she has never seen before on her plate, or try to get her to eat a grape (a grape of all things), and she will blanch and refuse to open her mouth. Then somebody offers her a Bugle chip for the first time and she pops it right in her mouth! How does she know?


I know I'm not alone in this struggle between toddlers and moms trying to feed them vegetables. Instead of giving in and letting her eat pizza and/or pancakes at every meal, I regularly resort to food espionage. I dastardly hide vegetables and vegetable purees in spaghetti sauce, scrambled eggs, oatmeal, meatloaf, and other seemingly innocuous foods.

Friday night, I had my sweetest victory yet in the vegetable wars. I took one of her favorite foods, pizza, and put a thin layer of chopped up spinach between the crust and the tomato sauce. I was nervous as I prepared the pie...was the spinach cut up small enough? Would a small leaf peek out from underneath the sauce and give itself away? When it came out of the oven, I was pleased to see that the spinach had melded seamlessly into the sauce. I put a piece on her plate, cut it up, and....Voila! Kate ate spinach!

So my tip of the week is to look for ways to sneak nutrition into your kids' (and your own!) diets, especially if you have a picky eater. You'd be surprised how well pureed cauliflower mixes in mashed potatoes and how good mashed up bananas taste in your pancakes.

My hope is, if I live long enough, I might one day see Kate knowingly, willingly eat a broccoli spear on her own accord. A mom can dream, right?