Saturday, February 23, 2008

Winter Squash and Getting Your Toddler to Eat Vegetables

Our CSA has a winter share this year that started up 6 weeks ago. It's been wonderful, but I noticed this weekend that I've been slacking. You see, with winter colds and an ear infection-turned- "I'm deaf in one ear", I haven't felt much like doing the weekend cooking.

So I looked on my counter and saw 6 winter squash from the CSA. One butternut, two acorn, three delicata. This added to the frozen spaghetti squash & butternut squash soup.

I decided to try roasting the squash, but cut up. I'm pretty lazy and it's really hard to cut squash. Mostly we cut in half, scoop out seeds, put face down, and roast. Today I had my husband peel two delicatas with the vegetable peeler and cut in half and seed. Frugal Marcia said "save and roast those seeds for a snack". Deaf Marcia said "we can do that with the next 4". Deaf Marcia won.

I diced the squash and roasted at 400F for about 40 min, in between attempts at a nap. I added canola oil, pepper, a little salt, and fresh rosemary (also from the CSA).

It was quite delicious.

We have been having a problem getting toddler to eat veggies. Since he started off eating them fine, I never expected that he would stop. So it's been a conundrum. I have found many suggestions on how to remedy this. Tonight I tried two:

1. Puree the squash with cheese, mix in some milk & serve as a dip with crackers. He didn't take to this idea (though he loves guacamole and hummus), but he did eat a few bites of the squash mix anyway. We ate the rest. It was good.

2. Frozen peas. Seems weird, but it actually worked. I don't mean that I cooked them. He just ate them right out of the bag.

Next I'm going to try pureeing and putting them in burritos. We still serve them to him directly, but he doesn't eat them. I just keep trying though.

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