Any Way You Slice It

Chips + dip, but make it vegetables

Hi Friends!

Happy New Year! You made it: and ever since this year began, you’ve exercised daily, woken up at 5:00 a.m. to pour your heart into a gratitude journal, and started your morning not with the jolt of coffee, but with hot water and lemon to nurture your microbiome. (If this applies to you, kindly stop reading.) 

Despite the fact that children are agents of chaos, adorable barriers to self-care of virtually any description, they can be our reason to—as Nana Mensah put it last week—skip the half pint of Ben & Jerry’s for dinner and actually prepare something nutritious. Because, while, sure, you could split a pint of ice cream with your toddler and call it dinner, it probably wouldn’t make either of you feel particularly good…and would all but guarantee a bedtime-hour meltdown. Fortunately for us parents, kids need to eat a variety of healthy ingredients to thrive, which gives us a better excuse than any to do the same for ourselves. In light of this, we thought we’d give you a few ideas for how to start off the year with an array of veggies on your plate—even if members of your household have historically been wary of what the vegetable kingdom has to offer.

We’ve heard from a lot of you that getting your kid to eat vegetables, or, indeed, anything green, can be a soul-destroying challenge, so this week’s newsletter is devoted to making hard ingredients a little more enticing. It’s easy to feel defeated when your kid refuses something. As Hannah Goldfield chronicled in her Cub Street Diet, her son was only rejecting his cucumbers because he wanted circles, not sticks. Obviously, Hannah! Whether our childrens’ reasons are rational or dictated by utter whim, it behooves us to keep trying, to mix it up, to do something as simple as changing the way we slice it. Because, it actually does matter. Cutting something whisper thin will make it taste different than presenting it as a wedge. Thinly sliced raw beet chips are a delight, for example, but chomping into a whole raw beet can taste like a spoonful of dirt.

Enter: a veggie-centric version of chips and dip! Beloved the world round! Between the fun shapes and textures and some colorful, nutrient-dense dips, you’ve got an edible activity board for your little one (and yourself)¹. Below, find our recipes for kiddo crudité (and if your kid isn’t on raw veggies yet, fear not, most of the dips we’ve created could be a meal unto themselves or could be combined with mashed steamed veggies for a delicious baby dinner).

Happy dipping!

Greta + Fanny

P.S.

We’re working on a newsletter that will focus on the age-old conundrum that is packed lunch, so we’re curious—do you have any brilliant hacks in the lunch department that you’d care to share? We want to include a few crowd-sourced ideas as well, because #solidarity. Just reply to the email or shoot us a message at thegreenspoon@yahoo.com (anything submitted will, of course, be attributed!).

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Carrots might curl the best, but celery, zucchini and more are welcome at this ribbon party