Salad Dippers! (Exclamation Point Must Be Included)
I'm back! Remember me? No? Why not? My posts were so mind-blowingly good that I earned an international fan base, with folks on every continent making their own "Beet Week" T-shirts in my honor, with my recipe and photos of beet pancakes on the back. (If I recall correctly, one reader politely intoned, "Why do these pancakes look like bloody hamburgers?" But my personal-time all favorite was the response to my recipe for chili with beets: "I thought you guys are supposed to be knowlegable. Damn.")
Anyway, that's me. After all this time. No more "knowlegable" but with a third son in tow. His older brothers, Squashcake and Squishpie, are calling him Sugar Bun. Yep, three boys. Can you do a rapid calculation of the number of boxes of cereal to be eaten at each breakfast when they're teens? I can. When it comes to groceries, I'm not ignoring the early warning signs for Lite Wallet Syndrome.
But for now, they're just little boys, 5, 3, and 6 months. So most of the time I can manage to create enough food to portion out to them, though I see real changes in that fact already beginning. The older one comes home from kindergarten famished and eats like a machine until I cut him off an hour before dinner. This is the kid of mine who will eat just about anything you'd think he wouldn't and nothing you'd think he would. No cheese, no ham, but please can I eat all the skins you peeled off the fruit that my younger brother won't eat? He's like that. And his very most favorite thing to eat is a salad with smoked salmon in it. Now you ought to see the faces the younger one can pull when offered salad. No. Can. Do. Salad.
BUT
I found out the 3-year-old will eat "Salad Dippers." See, it's all in the name my friends. And this is supported by real science. What happened was, I had too paltry a number of ingredients for a bona fide salad one evening, so I decided to set out some nice Romaine leaves, a few carrots sliced wee, and the last remnant of a red pepper. I put it all onto a plate in three separate piles and set it in the middle of the table. My big piece de resistance was to set out a tiny container for salad dressing at each setting. When the inevitable whine, "What's for dinnerrrrrrrrrrr" came, I thought quick. "Pasta, meatballs, and... SALAD DIPPERS!" Well this created a stir, let me tell you. Hands were flying, things were getting dipped. We made "Tiny Veggie Wraps" and "Lettuce Burritos," putting the pepper and carrot slivers onto Romaine canoes and floating them in our own dressing. Suddenly, the 5-year-old hollered "He ate a carrot!" and pointed at his brother. I just about fell out. He did eat that carrot. And several more, too. Plus, now he likes EVERYTHING dipped in ranch dressing.
I swear, it's so corny I just about can't stand it. Why does a thing like that work? It shouldn't. Why couldn't I just call it what the fancy French do--cru d'ete? Frankly, I think it's because little boys like verbs. Anyway. Try it out. Might work at your house.
--Sweet B
HopeSew on January 15, 2010 at 10:41 PM
Yep, it's all in the marketing. And Ranch dressing makes everything better. :)
Welcome back and congrats on Boy #3!
CABAL RMT on February 11, 2011 at 10:52 PM
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The Maritime Union, ARGO聽RMT
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