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Nov. 16th, 2008 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coraaThe blog I've been spending time reading instead of, you know, doing chores or working on my novel, is The Great Big Vegetable Challenge. It's the blog of a woman in London whose son hates (or anyway, hated) vegetables, resulting in dinner-table tantrums and family stress. She resolved to fix this with the Vegetable Challenge: they'd eat their way through the alphabet, starting with Artichoke and ending with Zucchini, trying each vegetable at least once, and often a few times, in a variety of ways. The kid wound up liking a lot more than he thought he would, probably partly because of the excitement of the project (he kept a world map and put stickers on the locations of all of his visitors, for example), but also partly because the vegetables were cooked in exciting ways: instead of just boiled peas, the pea recipes included fresh pea soups, pea pesto, and pea cupcakes. (And unlike a lot of trendy feed-your-kids-more-vegetables things, there was no deception involved: while some vegetables wound up in baked goods -- the pea cupcakes, and a beet-and-chocolate cake sort of in the style of carrot cake -- the kid always knew that he was, in fact, eating veg.)
It's quite charming. I'm not going to address its effectiveness in getting a veg-hater to try new things: the kid was pretty open-minded to start with, so I think it just took a wee bit of celebrity and some exciting new preparations to get him over the hurdle. And I'm just plain not qualified to talk about that, since I've never been especialy fussy. But the reason that I've been reading it is that a lot of the recipes look really good. I want to try the parsnip lasagne, the celeriac puree, the gazpacho, the runzas, the mushroom pasta sauce, the horseradish salmon wraps... the list goes on. I keep bookmarking things to try later. I love vegetables, and it's great to find a big selection of recipes that feature vegetables in exciting ways.
If you read it, I recommend using the "Older Posts" button to get all the way to the beginning, and read in chronological order.
It's quite charming. I'm not going to address its effectiveness in getting a veg-hater to try new things: the kid was pretty open-minded to start with, so I think it just took a wee bit of celebrity and some exciting new preparations to get him over the hurdle. And I'm just plain not qualified to talk about that, since I've never been especialy fussy. But the reason that I've been reading it is that a lot of the recipes look really good. I want to try the parsnip lasagne, the celeriac puree, the gazpacho, the runzas, the mushroom pasta sauce, the horseradish salmon wraps... the list goes on. I keep bookmarking things to try later. I love vegetables, and it's great to find a big selection of recipes that feature vegetables in exciting ways.
If you read it, I recommend using the "Older Posts" button to get all the way to the beginning, and read in chronological order.