I Told You It Was Good!

Supper -any meal here for that matter -often is a fight as Mandy and I both try to convince one or both of the kids to try something different, some food prepared a little differently from what the kids are accustomed to eating.

Once in a blue moon, those meals meet with a modicum of success -usually the success is with Kurtis but more often than not, anything new on the table is  met with lots of disdain and refusals to even taste it by Miss Maya.

To say she is stubborn, especially where food is concerned, well that's more than a bit of an understatement I guess!

Tonight, was no different from the norm with respect to a new type item on the menu.

I had fixed chicken-flavored rice-a-roni -which both the kids usually will eat without too much prodding and had corn for our vegetable du jour, along with applesauce -all three of those things are generally acceptable to both kids.

For our main dish though, I had fixed chicken -making my own chicken tenders and browning them and that too is usually an okay substance.

Tonight though, I added a little something to go with the chicken from a recipe I found called Chicken ala orange or something like that. All it consisted of was the chicken tenders and a sauce made from a little bit of orange marmalade mixed with corn starch, a little orange juice from a can of mandarin oranges and then, add the mandarin oranges in till just heated through a bit and serve to be spooned over the chicken.

Well, Maya allowed us to put a couple tenders on her plate but the sauce -there was no way that was going to come near her lips! Kurtis, on the other hand, allowed me to dribble a tiny bit of sauce over his chicken -which his sister, Kate -who is visiting here for a couple days -had cut up for him.

The rest of the meal consisted of Kurtis eating all around the chicken and every 2-3 minutes or so, he would ask about the chicken and the sauce, asking if the sauce tastes like mandarin oranges, if it was made from mandarin oranges, if it looked like mandarin oranges -you name it, if he could think of a question to ask and include about the mandarin oranges in it, he did that!

All the while, he still was avoiding tasting the chicken. He asked each of us at the table if the chicken tasted like mandarin oranges -which it didn't unless you put the sauce on it, ya know -and also, he would ask if he liked that.

We each kept reinforcing his questions by telling him to just taste it and he would see what it tastes like and that he would find it to taste good too.

Finally, after what seemed almost an eternity, he did get around to taking a small bite of the chicken and getting it in his mouth.

Slowly -very, very, slowly -he began to chew the chicken and then, took forever to swallow it too then but once he managed to do that he put his fork down, looked directly at me and announced, "See, I TOLD you it was GOOD!"

Needless to say, his wording there completely cracked the rest of us up but he did go on to finish eating his chicken tenders complete with a little dabble of orange sauce on each little bite of the meat!

The things one has to deal with to get a little bit of a healthy meal into a 6-year-old-system, huh?