Another weekend, another chance to torture small children with vegetables. This weekend’s secret weapon for making eating better fun was fondue.

The first course was cheese. Z hates cheese. We had bread, apples, and cauliflower to dip. She ate some of the apples but no cheese. That’s ok. She’s been crazily ambivalent about apples. One week she says she wants to eat apples and the next she says that she won’t ever eat anything apple flavored. So eating apples was an improvement. There was some screaming about the proximity of cheese to her. She needs to learn to deal.

After that we had veggie broth to cook snow peas, peppers, green beans, carrots, cheese tortellini, and shrimp (for the SO). There was more half hearted screaming about how scary it was to put the veggies in the broth since she didn’t know what it was. We started talking about saving the chocolate fondue until after she went to bed and then she got motivated to try things. The big deal was that we got her to try to tortellini with some tomato sauce. She has always refused pasta. I’m sure her Italian grandmother is spinning in her grave every time she declares pasta to be icky. But she liked the tortellini. Since she tried new stuff she got to have some dessert.

Today for lunch we had veggie stir fry over rice. She likes rice so she had a bowl of plain brown rice with some raw veggies around the edge of the bowl. She was disturbed about “dunking” the veggies in the rice. She ate the rice and then her father was brilliant. She is in a Tinkerbell phase. He told her that she needed to eat carrots to improve her eyesight so she could spot hawks that might eat fairies. That made her eat all her carrots. Then he told her that green beans help your vocal cords so she can yell out warnings after she spots the hawks. Lying liar but it was effective. Finishing her rice was going to help her be strong enough to fight off hawks. It is teamwork – I make the food and he cons her into eating it!