This morning my four-year-old caught me cooking a few florets of broccoli. I planned to puree them and then sneak them into her spaghetti sauce without her noticing. You see, both of my children don’t like vegetables. They don’t eat them, they don’t say hi to them on the street, they don’t invite them to their birthday parties. Vegetables are on the black list as far as they are concerned.
She went off to preschool in the morning, and I figured I had plenty of time to chop, boil, puree, and hide the offending veggie in her sauce. I made certain to conceal the blender that turned a handful of broccoli into an unidentifiable, yet woefully lumpy liquid. I cleaned the blender and placed it back in the cupboard before picking her up from her morning preschool. I had added sauce, then more sauce, then even more sauce, but the broccoli stood out like a sore thumb.
That’s not what happened when I smuggled zucchini in her sauce last week, I exclaimed inwardly.
Peering up at the stove from her 90 centimeter height, Kara looked at the pot in which the broccoli had been when she left that morning.
“Mommy, I only want noodles today,” she casually remarked, casting a furtive glance in the direction of the burbling cooking ware on the stove.
She is so smart, I thought, kicking myself for having used the same pot for the sauce that I had used for the broccoli. When we were all settled at the lunch table, I asked if she might want to have some pesto on her noodles as I did. No, she did not, But just as suddenly, she changed her mind. She was going to try the spaghetti sauce I had made for her. I jumped up, perhaps a bit too eagerly, grabbed her plate, and headed for the sauce pot. The green pearls of broccoli floated innocently in the sauce. I attempted to sift out the most obvious chunks of vegetable. Unfortunately, several stalks found their way into my daughter’s bowl.
“What’s this?” she shrieked, lifting her fork and turning up her nose simultaneously.
When I had swallowed a mouthful of my pesto spaghetti, I said, “It’s pesto sauce, only red.” With all the confidence that only a four-year-old can possess, she rolled her eyes at me, resigned herself to my well-intended lies, and ate the whole thing.
Christine Hohlbaum, author of Diary of a Mother: Parenting Stories and Other Stuff, lives with her husband of nine years and two children near Munich, Germany. Visit her web site at:
http://mypages.iparenting.com/webs/diaryofamother/diaryofamother.html
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