Since I just wrote about how Ella rejected my middle eastern burgers tonight, I should be fair and give her credit for an excellent dinner moment earlier this week. I'd made eggplant Parmesan, knowing that it might not be a meal that she or Dash would be very excited about, but with an abundance of tomato sauce in our freezer, eggplant in our farm box, and basil in our garden, it was an easy call. Oh, and it's yummy, right? Our family plan for the last several months has been to make food that we (as in the grown-ups) find delicious and healthy, and just to serve it to our kids without doctoring it for them or making them separate dishes. If they eat what we make, great. If they don't, well, they are unlikely to starve, especially if they look around the floor for all the cheerios that get dropped throughout the day. Basically, Josh and I just decided that we want for us all to eat the same dinner together every night and we want to show our kids that all kinds of food can be yummy. So on this particular night, I brought out the dish of eggplant parm to the screened porch where we were eating, and Ella looked at it very dubiously and said "Mama, can I pick out the eggplant?" I told her that that would be awfully hard to do that so she should just eat whatever part of it she wanted. Without any further prompting, she proceeded to eat one bite, then the entire helping. She proclaimed it delicious and then asked for a second helping. It was a family dinner MIRACLE, I tell you. The next day she told my mom that at first she didn't think she liked eggplant Parmesan, but then she tried it, and she liked it! Dash meanwhile, ate his serving, and then said "Mo pizza! Mo pizza!" Whatever, bud, you can call it anything you want as long as you keep eating it.
(And for anyone interested, the eggplant parm recipe from Cook's Illustrated is freaking delicious).
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