Kid Vs. Produce

First of all, let me just get the obvious out of the way.  My child is not wearing a shirt in the photo.  This is fairly common dinner attire around here in warmer weather, and while I’m not exactly proud of the fact that he’s not wearing a shirt while eating, it doesn’t trouble me much.  This year, produce.  Next year, manners.

Anyhoo… the salad wars rage on here at the Circus.  One of my favorites, precisely because it is complete trash, is a salad made from shredded cabbage and some other stuff, topped with crunched up ramen noodles and almonds that have been sauteed in butter and then sprinkled with that packet of death that comes with it. Ramen isn’t so bad you say?  Let Maki over at Just Hungry give you the rundown on why ramen is very, very bad for you.  I could top the salad with Doritos for the same nutritional effect.

Let it never be said that I’m high-brow over here.  Here’s what we started with:

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It appears that all we eat is soup around here. That’s not really the case, but it’s winter and I’m trying to get my kid to eat produce – and soup always sounds like a friendly-vegetable-delivery-system. With my flair for screwing up recipes, or blatantly not even trying to use a recipe, we’ve had some really weird soups over the last month and half. Part of me thought, hey, I should look up a great recipe for Tortilla Soup. But then, why break my streak?

We’re winging it over here – come along for the ride!

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“I’m sorry, you’re doing what with those bananas?”  That’s what everyone wanted to know when I started heating up the oil to fry the plantains.

“These are not bananas.  They are plantains.”  I didn’t have a plan for them when I purchased them, and as they sat on my counter, slow turning from green to yellow, yellow to black and yellow, I figured I’d better get off the stick and come up with a plan.

Of course, since I’ve never cooked with plantains before, I wasn’t sure where to start.  I thought about making muffins or something, but remembered that they are often used in savory dishes.  So I went internet diving to see what I could find.  Good ole Emeril had a recipe for a Pinon, a Cuban-style Beef and Plantain Pie. That sounded pretty darn good to me, but I thought the kids wouldn’t eat it if it was all baked together like that.  And then I found this recipe for Arroz ala Cubana that also sounded amazing.   I decided to riff off of both recipes and make Emeril’s beef mixture, but serve it over rice, and serve the plantains on the side.  Here’s what I started with (cribbed from Emeril’s recipe, sorta):

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I’ve been holding off on going to the store this week, because I had a bunch of produce in the drawer on the verge of giving me the finger and dissolving into goo before I could come up with a clever use for it.    Clever meaning something novel enough that The Boy would willingly eat it, but still sticking to our ground rules about no tricky, veggie-hiding muffins or whatever.  Besides, he doesn’t like muffins either.  Oh yes, you all envy me now, don’t you?

He also won’t eat most common dipping condiments, like catsup, ranch dressing, salsa, most cheese sauces.  He likes things plain.  And beige.  He does like scrambled eggs with melted cheese, so I figured we’d pull out some complementary vegetables and see what happened if I mixed them all together.

Here’s what we started with:

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