First of all, almost everything tastes better with garlic. And
when you add fresh garlic to something my philosophy with that is: the more the
better. I don’t think I’ve ever had a dish where I said, ‘oh this has too much
garlic.’ I have eaten things where someone else eating the same dish has said, ‘this
has a lot of garlic,’ and I barely noticed it. Bring it on, I say, when it
comes to garlic. Of course there are certain things that you should never add
garlic to, like desserts and sweet things, or anything that isn't cooked. (I am talking about cooked garlic here.) But when cooking things for a meal I
ask myself: could this use some garlic, even if it’s not always used here? Very
often the answer can be yes.
Second,
when it comes to salt, less is more. It is very easy to over-salt something and
once it’s in the food you can’t get it out. It’s best to add a little at a
time, but not too much. There are those people who say that salt makes things
taste better, but I say not true. Salt in
moderation can enhance flavor, but it can also make something taste like,
well, salt. I don’t want to have my food taste like salt. I want my food to
taste like what it is, not anything else. Yes, a little salt can make some
things taste worlds better, like potatoes for instance. I think that potatoes
are the one food that begs for salt. I can’t eat a potato these days without it.
But even then it should taste like a potato, not like salt. But overall, a
little salt is fine, but that’s it.
Third, when
it comes to children, there are a lot of tricks that can be used to get them to
eat vegetables. (This works well on adults, too, if you have any of those
around who don’t like to eat healthy things.) Usually you can just add the
vegetables to foods that they already like. For example, my children at one
point claimed a great hatred, not just distaste but intense hatred for peas. They
announced that they would never eat a pea, not in a million years, yuck, yuck,
yuck, etc. For quite a while I didn’t ever feed them any, but one day I put
some in with their macaroni and cheese, one of their favorite dishes. They gobbled
it up. And never said a word of complaint
about it. They finished every last bite of it, too. a couple of weeks later
they announced again their great intense hatred for peas when I told them they
had eaten some recently and didn’t seem to mind it at the time. Their eyes
became wide and their chins dropped. They looked almost pale. No, no, no, they
insisted, we would never eat peas, yuck, yuck, yuck. You must be making a mistake Mommy because we
don’t eat them. I then told them about the macaroni and cheese. What did you
think those little round green things were anyway? I asked them. They thought
for a few seconds. Then the light bulbs went off. You mean to say we ate them?! I became convinced that they
had not known what peas even were but had decided to hate them anyway before
this incident. But after that they ate peas with no problems.
Another trick
is to take vegetables and grind them up and mix them in with a sauce. This works
well with spaghetti sauce or any pasta sauce. I found a recipe recently for a
baked macaroni and cheese (still a favorite around here). For the sauce, you
boil some carrots and cauliflower and then grind them up in a food processor
with a little cheese – the really good kind – and that makes the cheese sauce
that you mix with the pasta. It looks and tastes like cheese sauce, but better
because you’re using good quality cheese. And you can’t tell that the veggies
are in there. Brilliant.
Another kid trick: sugar. Kids are so used to highly
processed, chemically laden foods that they expect that pow of flavor with every bite of whatever they eat, since that’s
their experience with the highly processed foods. I say if you want to eat more
naturally, to take them away from that experience and bring them into the experience
of tasting real food, try slipping some sugar into some dishes. They’ll never
know. But they’ll like the taste of whatever it is all the more. One example of
this is pasta sauce. I put in a tablespoon or so of sugar into the sauce to
make it a bit sweeter. They think my sauce is great – not because it’s anything special (in my humble opinion)
but because of the sugar. Try it sometime. You can always wean them off of it
slowly, if you want to, but that only works if you don’t get used to it
yourself.
