*From Loosha's fridge, with love* teeny tiny chopped salads🍅🥒🥕
why sometimes size matters
There are numerous “mommy food bloggers” (man, that title really gives me the ick). Anyway, I’ve noticed many of them out there really lean into the whole hiding vegetables in food whenever they can get away with it as their central piece of advice.
While I would never throw shade at blending up broccoli and zucchini and masquerading it as green mac n'cheese, I also don’t intuitively cook that way for myself, so it hasn’t felt like the move when it come to making sure Loosha has a nutrient rich variety in her diet.
If my kid is being annoyingly resistant to vegetables day after day, I attempt to change her relationship to them completely. A vegetable reset.
I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating. Sometimes changing her relationship means involving her more with the physical shopping and selecting of our produce, sometimes it means coaxing her into the kitchen to help me cook and taste, but sometimes all I have to do to shake things up is change the freaking size.
It sounds dumb and overly simplified, I know! But evidence has proven that sometimes changing the size or shape of a vegetable, in an over the top dramatic type of way, peaks her interest enough to get her amped up again. It kind of feels like I’m raising a chimpanzee not a toddler, but it works! And really there are probably way more similarities there than most of us would like to admit.
When we’ve reached these impasses before my instinct has been to go bigger; like in the case of roasting a whole head of cauliflower and serving it to her straight from the baking sheet with a big ol’ knife through the top. Her eyes bugged out of her head and she suddenly found herself digging in with abandon. It’s now one of her most dishes.
This week she wasn’t stoked on any of my offerings, so I tried to instead swing the opposite direction and go smaller. Like, teeny tiny itty bitty small. In the form of crunchy chopped salads.
There is something all together luxurious about a finely diced little chopped salad. The care of knife work needed, the effect of spooning big mouthfuls of it straight from the bowl, especially when tossed with lots of good olive oil and salt, that just tickles me. So, I knew it might be another way into Loosha’s food loving heart.
The vegetables we put in our tiny chopped salads vary, though Loosha requests no onion, and I oblige - after all, raw onion is not for everyone. One day I will try it in there again and see what happens. For now I’m just happy to see her gorging away on itty bitty teeny tiny salads without having to hide a single thing from her.
No real recipe needed to get this right for your family. Start with vegetables you know your kid likes or at least tolerates and dice them itty bitty small. Season with olive oil and salt, maybe some lemon or tahina right into the bowl as seen above. Make sure to let them choose their favorite spoon - since we all know salads tastes better when eaten with a good spoon.
Great idea with the cauliflower!