It is a well-established fact that when you want a child to eat, they will not.
I did not always know this. Before I became a parent, I labored under the misconception that the rules would not apply to me. That a child’s refusal of perfectly good, perfectly healthy food reflects some deficit in child-rearing, and naturally would not be a problem for me, a professional food writer, whose love of food is in fact genetic. No, I reasoned with woefully unearned confidence, my child’s palate would be as expansive as the Great Plains. As vibrant as a Van Gogh. As thoughtful as a sonnet.
Well.
When my daughter was three, she unexpectedly became a viral internet sensation after a noted social media personality spotted her ham-fisting a pickle at the farmers market, devouring it in the manner of an ice cream cone. The comments cooed what a good eater she was, that “Pickle Girl” was their “spirit animal,” and so forth. Lies! I screamed in my head. All lies!
In reality, Pickle Girl had precipitously tumbled off her growth curve just months earlier. Getting her to eat anything (pickles aside) was a daily struggle, and one doctor even suggested that I stop feeding her anything but red meat in an attempt to get her weight up. I smiled to that woman’s face and privately refused, instead dosing everything my daughter allowed past her lips with copious amounts of butter and oil.
Nearly four years later, her eating habits have mercifully improved. But there was no lightning bolt that changed everything, no moment that she thought to herself, You know, I actually don’t want my mother to contemplate hurling herself into oncoming traffic every time I reject another homemade dinner. Rather, the shift came gradually, one small success at a time. We never stopped offering her bites of scary-to-her foods, often accompanied by varying forms of bribery. We started planning family meals around things we knew she liked, slowly expanding her repertoire. We also started cooking with her.
We’d been plodding along like this for a while when the Bon Appetit team presented me with a complimentary meal code from Blue Apron and asked if I might like to try it with my family. Was it a good idea?
Here’s the thing: Cooking with a child who is afraid of most ingredients presents serious logistical challenges. There’s plenty of “Ew, yucky!” and “Get it off me! Get it off me!” and, naturally, so many tears. I developed a tactic of choosing recipes strategically (usually a variation on a Safe Food); limiting the amount of raw meat (a nonstarter if there ever was one); and portioning out the ingredients, which (1) makes it easier for her to dump things into a big bowl and (2) proves to her that we aren’t hiding anything.
Portioning out ingredients is great in theory, but it’s yet another thankless bit of drudgery that requires use of far more measuring spoons and ramekins than is within the realm of sanity. This compounds the mess inherent to cooking with a young child, who, turns out, is apt to get as much flour on the floor as inside the bowl.
But! Ingredients from the meal kit delivery service come preportioned, which theoretically could make the cooking-with-kid experience more palatable. I was willing to give it a shot.
Meal kit, to the rescue?
Last week, my daughter and I perused the menu online together, and she was drawn to the Falafel & Farro Bowls with Feta, Veggies & Garlic Tahini Sauce. Falafel is well-established in the I Like It canon, though my daughter “doesn’t like it sometimes,” she warned. (Keeping me humble, smart.) Farro is new to her, but she promised to approach it with an open mind. (“It’s like rice?” she asked. Like rice, I assured her.) The veggies—a lemon-spiked salad of cucumber, cherry tomatoes, and Kalamata olives—were in the clear. (Every picky eater is different, and this one likes vegetables. Go figure.) Feta has historically not been a win for us (too salty), but anything is possible when she’s feeling brave, a.k.a. sensitive to my mental well-being.
Strangely, the process of getting my daughter more comfortable with food has made her, at just under seven years old, pretty competent in the kitchen. She has her own arsenal of child-friendly tools, including a miniature whisk and spatula, Montessori-style chef’s knives, and a finger guard. Her knife skills are fairly decent, considering that she’s basically slicing at things with dull plastic.
When we opened the kit on a Tuesday night, she easily surveyed all of the Blue Apron ingredients—which, true to advertising, came individually portioned (praise be)—and started chopping. I basically just watched, jumping in with cutting tips or to reposition her knife grip.
I couldn’t help but notice how into it she was. Her reading comprehension has recently exploded, which meant she could mostly decipher the recipe herself. A majority of the work took the form of chopping; the dry falafel mix came pre-spiced (just add water) as did the garlic-tahini sauce (just add lemon). I took over to shallow-fry the falafel patties in olive oil. But she was able to do nearly everything else herself with minimal guidance, something that delighted her to no end.
“It makes me feel really confident, like I can make other things too,” she told me, clearly enjoying this sliver of spotlight. (“This is for your work, right? I’m going to be in a magazine, right? Which is really famous, right?”)
“It also makes me feel helpful and very happy,” she continued. “I ’specially like doing it with my family.”
All this is well and good, but the bigger question remained: Will she eat it? My daughter, ever the diplomat, was quick to level-set expectations. “I’m not sure,” she cautioned. “But I’m more likely to try it because I made it.” Fair enough.
When cooking was complete, the table set, and plates piled high, I tried my best to hide that I was watching her like a hawk. In my peripheral vision, I spied her palming a falafel patty and tentatively taking a nibble. A big smile spread across her face. “This is, like, really good,” she beamed. Next up was the farro salad with arugula and feta. “Mmm!” Each bite she swallowed registered like dopamine in my system. By that point, she'd already been nibbling at the veggie salad for a full hour while we cooked.
Did she clear her plate? No, she did not. Did she pick out all of the farro and feta, leaving behind sad bits of arugula? Yes, she did. But was this Blue Apron experiment a success? It most certainly was.
Tune in next time to hear what happens with my four-year-old son, who refused a single bite of this entire meal.
