When life hands you zucchini

If you are a parent of a 2 year old, chances are you've experienced the joys of picky eating. Try as hard as you might to make something healthy taste delicious, your toddler still rejects it, criticizing your culinary skills with the dreaded "it tastes yucky"! It's frustrating, it's infuriating and at times it's devastating because you've worked so hard to make something healthy taste really good, hoping that your child will accept your loving offering and grow healthy and strong.

Living in the city, we get an order of fresh, organic vegetables delivered to our home about every other week. It's my one real luxury. And it helps us eat better. I only find out a few days before what is coming, and for the most part I don't have any say, so I have to make things that are new, and eat things I normally wouldn't pick out. I avoid the overwhelmed feeling I have when I walk into the produce section at the grocery store, but we still enjoy produce. And normally I also get some fruit for my girls to enjoy as well. And we love it!

This past week, however, something strange happened. Instead of the extra order of fruit we normally receive, there were extra vegetables. Extra vegetables?! I was annoyed and disappointed. This was no good. First of all, I have 2 toddlers who eat few if any vegetables on a regular basis. Secondly, I don't even like most vegetables unless well disguised, and being on a diet my disguises are limited. For instance, I probably loathe zucchini as much as my children do, though I can choke it down provided it is only an every-other week event.

But when I got home that day, there were 2 big zucchinis staring out at me from my vegetable drawer. Disaster was looming. The kids won't eat it, I don't like it, and the only way I do like it, my dearest husband doesn't. What was I to do?!

At that point I remembered something an exuberant friend of mine had mentioned a few weeks ago. She had served fried zucchini to her 3 year old, convincing him it was french fries. What the heck! Anything was worth a try at this point. I got out my golden flax seed meal and garbonzo flour (trying not to abandon my dietary principles with actual flour), peeled and cut that zucchini into sticks approximately the size of french fries. Then to complete the masterpiece, I spread catchup on them on the little darlings' plates.

Lo and behold, my oldest gobbled them up and asked for more...and more! I was nearly in shock, and about to dance. It was all I could do to scream "My daughter is eating zucchini!" to the whole world to demonstrate my tremendous mothering talents. However, I was somewhat afraid that if I said the Z word, she would stop gobbling up those "fries"

Quietly I learned an important lesson: sneaky is best when it comes to serving vegetables. From here on out my food motto is "when life hands you zucchini, make french fries!" I will continue to find ways to disguise vegetables in our evening meals. For instance, did you know that a medium summer squash properly blended into 4 potatoes makes for wonderful mashed potatoes? My kids never knew, neither will yours!