My Dinner is Broken. There's No Broccoli.

People are always asking me how I get my kids to eat vegetables, and the main way is that I eat them, but there are other tricks too.

We went to a farm where you get to pick your own vegetables a few days ago, and just showing my daughter that those are the collard greens/lettuce/carrots/broccoli that she picked makes her completely interested in eating those foods.  This always works at the store, to a lesser degree.  If she wants to get melon, cauliflower, or apples, there's a good chance she's going to eat them.

Another trick is to have her help me cook.  Tonight I was just going to roast some vegetables, so it was a perfect time to give her freedom to suggest whatever she thought would be good.

We made broccoli, garlic, chickpeas, and mushrooms, tossed with olive oil, dulse, salt, and red pepper flakes.  Then she insisted we cover it all in tomatoes, and I added some balsamic and nutritional yeast.

She gobbled that dinner up, but especially the broccoli that she had picked herself.  After she ate all the broccoli, and he baby brother had eaten most of his food, she went to get him seconds (without anyone asking her to, which was pretty sweet).  She said she was just getting him the beans, because he like that best (again, really sweet).

Then she said she wanted to get herself another bowl, but her bowl was still half full because she had only eaten the broccoli.

"I think my dinner is broken.  It's ruined, maybe.  It doesn't have any broccoli."

To my little vegan sweety, her dinner is ruined without broccoli.  Meanwhile my friends can't figure out how I get her to eat broccoli :)