Make the baby cook!

...but don't make the baby eat!

These are two of the tips that childhood nutrition instructors offer to parents in a recent Times article about parental food-mistakes. Its quite an interesting article about how our food tastes develop as children. There's a lot of common sense in the article, but sometimes, especially if your sense is a little uncommon, its nice to hear some common sense.

One of my favorite tips: if your kid eats too many cookies, stop buying cookies. Its pretty good advice. In fact, I wish that all of our problems were this easy to solve. I suppose that the "opposite" of this advice is also true: "If you are unable to stop buying cookies, your kid will eat too many cookies."

My favorite tip from the article, however, doesn't just work on kids, it works on me, too:

"Don't serve boring vegetables."

It's very easy to add a little zing to vegetables, with only minimal effort. These are easy recipes to prepare, and although they all have some fat added, its healthier for you to hork down 1/2 lb of broccoli with a tablespoon of oil on it than it is to eat only a couple of plain florets while swearing you'd rather starve than be a vegetarian.

Two vegetables:
Choose two vegetables that you think go well together. I like to put a sliced onion (or shallot) with something green, like peas, asparagus, or rapini.

Now saute them. For sliced shallots and peas you would add some oil to a pan, and saute them until they are almost done, then add the peas, and continue to saute everything until the peas are warm.

Now, remove the pan from the heat and melt 1 TB butter into the pan. Serve.

You could also add some sliced garlic, or red pepper flakes, maybe a little cumin.

One vegetable:
mix:
1 T lemon juice
1.5 T olive oil
1/4 t salt
1/4 t Tabasco

Now, prepare your vegetable as you like and toss with the sauce. This works especially well with broccoli, which I steam. I think that the broccoli is done when it is still fairly firm.

Vegetable puree:
This works really well with any squash, but I've also done it with broccoli. The trick is starting with the right amount of water. You don't want to dump any water out after you simmer because that water contains some of your nutrients, and you don't want to spend too much time boiling it all off, or the vegetable might end up like baby food.

Cut 1 squash into 2-inch pieces. Simmer in a covered saucepan with 3/4 C water, a garlic clove, and 1/2t salt for about 20 minutes, until it is tender. You should have a few tablespoons of water left.

Add squash to food processor along with the leftover water, 1/2 C milk, 1 T butter, and freshly ground pepper and more salt to taste. Puree.

Variations on the puree:

• If you want to try it with broccoli you'll need more water, about 3/4 cup for every pound of broccoli, and omit the milk.
  
• You can omit the milk for the squash, too, but you'll want to have at least 1/2 cup of water left over before you puree, so start with more water.
  
• You could add a jalepeño pepper at the simmering step to add some spiciness.