NOBODY tells a parent to be how futile an exercise cooking for your young will be.
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Yesterday evening for instance, I have had a delicious side of roast simmering away in the slow cooker all afternoon, which I lovingly plated up for my hoards with a side of fresh veggies and chips.
Can you guess what I have spent half an hour cleaning up from the floor? I am fairly sure the air in our household must be high in calories, because I have no idea where these kids get their sustenance from.
Once you get past babyhood, that beautiful time when you can force feed them any kind of vegetable mush you desire and giggle about the sour faces they pull with each new flavour, you really have no option but to serve nothing but potato – mostly in chip/fries form for around four years, with sauce.
I think these kids have thwarted every sneaky food preparation idea I have come across.
The old dying the food different colours was not fun. Sure purple vegetables look fun, but not so much fun to clean up, and said purple vegetables still taste like vegetables.
Shredding veggies didn’t work either.
I have marvelled at the eagle-eyed ability of my children to spot and pick out the smallest shredded carrot bits.
You just can’t hide green and orange.
Try using cheese sauce I hear you say. Cheese sauce is very easily sucked off the food you are attempting to camouflage.
I was probably better off just serving up a bowl of sauce.
Cutting food into “fun” shapes didn’t work. Oh and I had to eat the not so attractive off cuts for my dinner, whilst the good bits hit the floor.
Making spaghetti out of vegetables was a loss too as they suck the sauce off normal spaghetti anyway and then use it to make a wig from.
Recently we strayed from normal potato chips and went with sweet potato chips. They were not received well.
They are orange, what was I thinking.
Mother guilt dictates that I should make sure my children eat veggies.
Well really they need to eat something in general for that to happen – so what am I to do? I know, I’ll make it all into a sauce!