Good Eaters

My kids are not picky, thank goodness. They have a lot of "eccentricities" (Will cried herself to sleep in my lap tonight because she does NOT want to walk five times around the ellipse while holding the globe at her school birthday next week. This is great, because her teachers already think I'm a total stage mom), but fussy eating is not one of them.

It's spoiled me as a mom, though. The other day a little friend was over for a playdate with Will, and I served them a snack of peanut butter sandwiches, sliced apples, and frozen blueberries. The kid was all, "I don't eat any of this kind of food," and I was all, "Okay, your mom will have dinner for you tonight, I'm sure." And then my kids ate her share, too.

It's too bad my girlies don't have a gourmet chef for a mother, because they're probably like food savants or something, but we'll never know because I serve them some basic ten-minute-prep combination of protein, two fruits/vegetables, and fiber and/or dairy at nearly every meal. Spring is a good season for us, though--we've got some nice, fresh, local foods coming in that we haven't tasted for a while, and then it must be like a fall harvest time in the southern hemisphere or something, because we scored ourselves a bounty of pineapples and avocados and bananas at the store this week (not local, no, and certainly not organic, except for the bananas, but we are pure suckers, plain and simple, for pineapples and avocados).

So last night we had "Big Salad," which is what the girls dub it when I fill all the little compartments on their dinner trays with nice, raw, delicious things--kale, pineapple, sesame seeds, apple and orange slices, bananas, avocado--and some bread, cheese, and soysage, too, of course:
It was yummy, says the look of their faces, and such a nice change from the root vegetables and pastas and casseroles of the winter:
The nice thing about these kids, though, is that they help me to expand in all my capacities. We have had a juicer since our wedding day, and we have not used it once. And yet, at some point I must have mentioned the existence of said juicer to my children (I can't believe I even remembered it), because they have been asking me off and on for months to get out the juicer and make them some juice. I stalled them all winter, because there's just not an ample-enough produce stock in the winter to justify playing with a juicer, but with two pineapples and a big bag of kale and a bunch of bananas and a bag each of apples and oranges hanging around the kitchen, I could stall no longer, and so we juiced: And juicing? Is awesome. It's so easy that Syd can feed the juicer independently, if I stand near and unnecessarily warn her every two minutes to watch her fingers. We made juice All. Freakin' Day (This also might be because we were stuck inside as workers dismantled the tree next door, branch by branch, pausing only to sit on their coolers in the shade in between the houses and talk trash about my lawn, apparently not realizing that our windows are open and I can HEAR THEM--dudes, my yard is not THAT bad, and I LIKE the grass long, and we EAT the dandelions so of course we're not going to spray them). Kale and pineapple is the best combination, in my opinion, although the girls' juice was pretty much just a composite of every single thing--kale, pineapple, orange, apple, banana--every single time.

But yeah. Awesome nevertheless.