We are raising vegetarian children who don't eat vegetables. Yup. Pickle will occasionally allow a piece of broccoli to cross her lips, but mostly she'll only eat it if it has a certain sauce from a certain Chinese restaurant in town. I have tried to duplicate the sauce to no avail. She'll eat tiny mushroom fragments in a particular brand of couscous. But other than that, she turns her nose up. Pepper is a little more adaptable but it sort of depends which way the wind is blowing and whether or not she can eat it directly off mine or her father's plate.
Fruit is a different story. The girls LOVE fruit. They will even chose fruit over candy (okay, not all the time, but still...) and eat plenty of it.
But man, the vegetables.
Even though we don't eat meat, they basically eat the same sort of things most kids eat these days: pizza, chicken nuggets (soy), pasta, hot dogs (soy), yogurt, peanut butter.
I put veggies out at dinner, but I don't demand that they eat them. This is a personal parenting preference, but I think that forcing them to eat something they don't want might help them in the short-term but not for a lifetime of eating well and making good food choices. And once in a while, the girls try something new- we haven't stumbled upon any gold mines yet, but I remain hopeful.
It's ironic that as a child, the only vegetables I ate were corn and potatoes. Although there was an occasional apple and a few bananas here and there. I was eighteen and at a college cafeteria when I suddenly had an inexplicable urge for the canned peaches at the salad bar. Two years later I began my journey away from eating meat.
The point of all this is that I have started "supplementing" food. My hope is that sooner rather than later we will stumble into some more nutritious and adventurous eating on the part of the Pickle and the Pepper. Until then, I add shredded zucchini to potato pancakes, tiny little imperceivible carrots to sweet potato slices or spaghetti sauce (which is suspect in and of itself to the girls) and the occasional pepper into whatever I think I can successfully hide it.
And my newest discovery: Spinach to the smoothies.
I didn't believe the websites when they said the girls wouldn't notice, but low and behold: the color doesn't change much and the taste is the same.
I just have to get up twenty minutes earlier than them now so they can't what I put into it. I'll tell them the truth when they hit college.
