2010: Adventures in Vegetableland

It's January: Tis the season for resolutions. Though not a formal resolution, I would like to get back into blogging. I miss writing, and I don't mean legal documents (I don't miss that. It's my life, every day). Anyway, there's a family resolution in the works and it involves vegetables. Incidentally, it also involves blogging, so I might as well kill two birds with one stone.

In an effort to get The Girl to eat more vegetables, I suggested that we might try a new vegetable per week. Initially, she negotiated down to a new vegetable every two weeks, but she's subsequently rethought her position and we're back at one a week (I suspect she realized that she'd have to eat the same vegetable for two weeks in a row....). We also decided to go alphabetically. The Girl insisted we start at "Z" because she was concerned that she'd have to deal with brocoli only two weeks into the new year. And really, she wondered, why ruin a good thing so soon??

So far we've successfully incorporated zucchini into fajitas and mac-and-cheese casserole. I'm actually astonished that she's levelled nary a complaint. We have bargained often on the vegetable front, with little to no success. I'm not sure what's different about this attempt, but she's going with it so far.

The deal is six dishes per week. In the past, she's sometimes agreed to try something, but her definition of trying something involves eating about a micron of the offending veg on the end of her fork. This time, we said that trying meant eating it for real, and in a variety of ways. Like I said, for some reason she agreed to this. Possibly because she herself realizes that this whole vegetable thing is about her having power (and not about the taste of food), and refusing to eat veggies is a poor use of hers, especially since we're not the type of parents to leave our kids powerless. Also, we genuinely won't make her eat something if she doesn't like it. But, as we've often argued, you can't know if you like something if you don't try it.

Next up: Zucchini stirfry, by request of The Girl herself.

How long can this success last? I'm closetly optimistic.