January 5, 2025
Among the things we are grateful for this past year, my husband added this: those times when at least one child eats my cooking. Pleasing a single child is not so hard. Our eight year old son meets the dinner table with surprising flexibility. I ask which cross-section of the options I compile on an ordinary weeknight he would like on his plate, and he often replies, “Chef’s choice,” warming my heart. He can be downright chipper about it, offering a thumb’s up or declaring a purposely ridiculous superlative, the best soup I’ve had this Tuesday.
But all five of us enjoying the same meal? Like, I cook one dinner, and everyone eats it and no one demands an alternate dinner or eats so many pre-dinner snacks they don’t need dinner and we sit at the table together and all just eat what I’ve made? Vanishingly rare.
Two members of my family which shall go unnamed subsist substantially on carbs and cheese. It is hard to argue with loving what is probably the most perfect food pairing. Toast with melted cheese, cheese pizza, mac and cheese, or our home base, cheese quesadilla—no contesting the deliciousness. But does the relationship have to be quite so exclusive? Various books in the picky eater genre have made their way into our household: e.g., the parents won’t try anything, and we laugh as the protagonist children of the book goad and cajole the parents, attempting to get them to take a bite, just one bite! Anything green. It’s the laugh of recognition, seeing on paper the same fruitless prodding you keep falling into. The stories follow the same hopeful trajectory: the picky eater finally becomes willing to try, realizes what he or she has been missing, and becomes awakened to the newly wonderful world of food in color, like Dorothy entering Oz.
Our current trajectory is another round of cheese quesadillas.
It’s the dinner we make before dinner, the dinner we make after dinner, the snack we take hiking, the school lunch we’re occasionally convinced to pack. My kids can now make their own, even if in doing so they scatter shredded cheese snow on the floor.
At least the kids will eat, more than half the time, the mandated three plants accompanying each round of carbs and cheese: raw cucumber cut to a point, like a unicorn. Raw mini sweet peppers. Cherry tomatoes. Baby carrots. Clementine. Apple. No, avocado doesn’t count as one of the three, but sure, you can have some. Pick three. Only one can be a fruit. This caution inevitably invokes commentary pointing out with a child’s confidence in clean categories that cucumbers are a fruit. Yes, dear, peppers and tomatoes too. But you know what I mean. EAT.
But don’t let this seemingly generous list of fruit-slash-vegetables fool you. Dare to mix foods they’ll otherwise reliably eat—say, soup with, pepper, tomato and carrot, and you invite the upturned nose. Not mixed. Not seasoned. Not cooked. Give it to me straight, mom, or not at all.
It’s the weekend before the first big snow of the season, the last day of Christmas—bean weather. Beans are not in the meal plan but seem like the kind of thing you’ll be grateful for on a snowy day, coming in wet and rosy, fingers numb. How nice to pull from the fridge a warming stash of beans.
I haven’t had the foresight to soak the night before, that would a stretch too far, but the package suggests a few hours simmering is enough, even without soaking. It’s not a problem with my normal routine: 5 cups water to 1 lb beans, 1 tbsp olive oil, 1 tsp salt, bay leaf, Instant pot. Ready set go.
But the homey narrative suggestion on the package catches my eye: start with sautéed aromatics. I can hear the crackle of onions on hot oil, smell the way the garlic will pervade the dark mid-winter afternoon—and it’s a swell way to use up the single green bell pepper lollygagging in my fridge. It’s all getting mushed with the beans eventually, I figure, so in the food processor it goes, the pepper, an onion sliced into big cubes, two peeled carrots casually cut into chunks, extra garlic. Blitz for a few seconds, then into the hot oil to cook down for ten minutes before adding the beans and water, rinsing out the food processor in the process. Simple, maybe five real minutes of labor in the middle of whatever else I’m already in the kitchen. The percolating garlic-onion steam prompts a sigh of satisfaction at when my husband comes in from outside. Classic housewife trick.
The beans simmer while we feed kids whatever mishmash of leftovers we can convince them to put away. Simmer while we eat our own leftovers, the New Year’s cabbage and farro soup. Simmer while we finish stuffing Christmas cards, a multi-step process that makes us feel like we’re time-warped in a colonial bureaucracy. “Tapone,” my husband sings out as he stamps the stack of cards, echoing French spy comedy series A Very Secret Service. “Double tapone,” I return in the same sing-song voice, stamping, stamping, stamping more.
The next morning there is no sign of all those vegetables—they’ve melted and morphed into what looks to the untrained eye like pure bean. My bean-loving daughter happily pounds them to a rough puree with the potato masher, not flinching as I pour in the remains of two almost empty salsa jars with a little water, smoked paprika, more garlic.
Then we spoon it into a form she knows well, plumped tortilla, topped with cheese with quickly melts, browning on the griddle, and before I know what’s happening, my daughters are fighting over who gets the first burrito. I don’t want to tell them how many vegetables they are in fact consuming for fear of breaking the spell. All five of us sit down to a Sabbath meal, all five of us eat the same thing, at more or less the same time, and that thing may be carbs and cheese but there are plants, eaten willingly (if unknowingly). A Christmas miracle.
