Kid Vs. Produce

Artichokes. They aren’t the most reasonable vegetable to approach a produce-averse child with, but I figured it was time. I love artichokes. And although the Chef and my husband will eat them as well, The Boy has never willingly eaten a plain, steamed artichoke before. (He’s had them in that spinach pie I made, and I’ve sneaked them into casseroles.) I figured this would be a one-biter before he ran screaming into the night.

To up the chances that he’d eat SOMETHING, I decided to pair the artichokes with chicken sausage and quinoa.  Here’s what we started with:

• Quinoa, prepared according to package directions in my rice steamer, using chicken broth as the liquid.
  • One scrawny carrot
  • A couple cloves of garlic
  • 1/2 a small red onion
  • 1 package of spinach, fontina and roasted garlic chicken sausages (fully cooked)
  • grated Parmesan cheese

First things first. After giving the artichokes a rinse in the sink, the kids helped me pluck off the first few rows of tough leaves, and clean up the stems.

Then, because we are so high tech and all, we wadded up some pieces of foil and used them to hold the artichokes stem-side-up in a pot of simmering water. I slapped on the cover and let them cook for 25 minutes. Meanwhile…

We sliced up the onions, garlic and carrots. Then I heated up some olive oil in my new dutch oven that I got at Target. Woo!

In went the veggies:

Look, I know the lighting is really kind of pathetic in my kitchen. I need to do something about it. But for now, let’s just imagine that I’m cooking by candlelight or something romantic and rustic. Look! We cut up the sausage and tossed that in the pan too.

Meanwhile, our artichokes were done, so we pulled them out and tossed them in a bowl of water with a few chunks of ice in it. Technically, there should have been more ice, but we were down to our last few cubes because SOMEONE forgot to refill the ice trays. (Hint: me.)

Don’t they look vaguely like frogs? It was sort of creeping me out. Didn’t stop me from whacking one in half, though, and cleaning out the fuzzy guts.

So, anyhoo, in the meantime, the sausage was pretty much done, and the quinoa was done and right before I tossed the two together, I added a gratuitous chunk of butter:

And then I put it all on a plate. Like this:

That little blowfish cup has melted butter, because The Boy doesn’t like mayo. I know, right? It is like my genetic material isn’t even in there.

At first, we had a comedy of errors where he dipped one end, then the other, then turned it around and put it in his mouth the wrong way, and then the other wrong way. Finally, he got it turned the right way, and appropriately dipped.

The moment of truth. Would he eat it? Would he die?

You guys – he ate the whole thing, then the other half. And had some of mine. HE LOVED IT. And it wasn’t that he was just licking the melted butter off the leaves – he actually ate them. Color me stunned.