Tomato season is drawing to an end, so we didn’t want to waste an opportunity to have some fun with tomatoes from our garden.  Monkey was delighted to create this smiley face, with some help from me.  We also made other faces before slicing them up and eating them in a salad.

Using the “sqaure foot gardening” method developed by Mel Bartholomew way back in the day, we’ve created some garden boxes along our driveway.  This is the place where Monkey likes to hang out if she’s not painting on her easel.  We have a pot full of kid’s tools and purple gardening gloves that she almost fits into.  And she digs right in – literally.  Her favorite parts of gardening are planting and harvesting.  It’s hard to find enough green beans for a meal because the little scavenger has already been through all of them before I can get to them.  If there is any magic bullet to getting a child to eat their veggies, it has to be having that child help to grow them.  I wouldn’t have believed it until I saw it with my own eyes.  My daughter seems to intuitively understand that we pick and eat whatever is ripe and ready - concepts she picked up by observing us in the garden.  I have seen this with children at Farmer’s Markets, visits to farms, family garden, neighborhood pea patches, and even from container gardens.  It doesn’t take much and it’s well worth the effort.

Today I just didn’t even feel like trying.  We’ve been reading this great book all week – it’s called Dog Day by Sarah Hayes-and in it, a young boy and girl are eating sandwiches for lunch.  I thought this would be a great tie in for us since Monk hardly ever eats bread.  I’ve tried all week: PB&J, ham and cheese, grilled cheese, tuna fish, cucumber and hummus and tomato.  Nothing is getting through, or more appropriately hardly anything seems to be making it into her mouth.  We saw our friend Jen today for a playdate, and she asked if we had any good ideas for lunch.  There was an edge of hopefulness in her voice.  Alas, I can only offer a good recipe for the adults in the house:

The Best Grilled Cheese Recipe

Start with hearty whole grain bread.  Spread some non-dairy butter like Earth Balance on one side of each piece of bread.   Place one piece of bread directly down into a frying pan; I prefer cast iron or an easy to clean stainless steel frying pan.  Grate some cheese (a creamy gruyere works perfectly, but I’ve never turned my nose up at anything on hand in the fridge) and then also grate a little carrot directly onto the piece of bread in the pan.  Place the other piece of bread, buttered side up, on top of the sandwich and then turn on your burner to a medium-low setting.  Fry both sides until bread is toasty and cheese is melting.

Monk will tolerate this sandwich although mainly she rips off the bread and eats the melted cheese.  Then she asks for some kind of fruit.  Mango?

I have some good friends who swear by the sneaky chef / deceptively delicious books.  We tried it and it didn’t work at our house.  Here’s why, I think:

a.     Some children don’t like surprises (and neither do some adults!)

b.     How will they learn to like / or appreciate a food, if it is hidden?

c.     A lot of kids, including Monkey, don’t like mixed flavors

As if to confirm that we’re on the right track for Monkey, today at lunch she snubbed the mini carrots from the bag today at lunch, but then heartily snacked on a fresh from the garden “BIG Carrot” for dinner (our only carrot from the garden this season, by the way.)

Another great tip from a friend: frozen foods! No, I don’t mean the kind that come in a tray and that you put in the microwave for a few minutes. I mean literally pulling fresh berries and veggies out of the freezer. Believe me, I was surprised too, to watch my little monkey eat and prefer frozen blueberries straight. She does the same thing with peas, and she has tried broccoli and edamame the same way (little success with the edamame.) Its approaching 100 degrees F here today, so I don’t blame her. Its so easy and so fast. Here she preferred to have simply frozen blueberries for breakfast, even over the buckwheat pancakes that she had requested.