Fussy vegan

Now if you’ve read this part of the blog before you’ll know that junior is rather particular (i.e. fussy) in what she eats. Unfortunately things seem to be going from bad to worse. I know they say when children are fussy eaters they’re merely seeking to exercise some control over their environment in the only way they know how, but as junior seems to control every other aspect of her life I don’t see why she has to control this one as well!
Yesterday morning she had the normal coco pops with soya milk and a drink of chocolate soya milk and then I packed her lunch and took her off to school. On her return over 6 hours later I find the only thing she’s eaten out of her lunch bag was a banana. In spite of only having her cereal and a banana all day she was bouncing around with energy and as lively as ever. Now, I like bananas and yes, they do give me a bit of energy but not that much. I wondered if she was eating other food at school but she says not, I even asked her if she’d like to try some food like daddy eats (i.e eggs or meat – showing how desperate I was feeling) and she just said “why are you asking me that?” I tried to explain that I was concerned about the restrictions she was placing on her diet (she’s a very wordy 5 year old with a large vocabulary so I can use bigger words!) and wanted her to try some new things. I then suggested we make some soup with carrots and lentils to which she did her usual thing of saying it sounded yummy and she’d be happy to help make it but she wouldn’t want any to eat. The conversation deteriorated after this and I ended up taking deep breaths whilst she sat in her room screaming. Oh joy!!! After a good 5 minutes’ of venting her spleen she decided she was hungry and I bribed her to eat grated carrot, sweetcorn and wholemeal toast by promising her a square of chocolate if she finished it all. Oh the depths I’ll sink to, they really know no bounds.
Later on we printed out a picture from the net of a Vegan Food Pyramid which we are going to study together later today. After a cursory glance, junior decided she’d try pineapple! Odd one I know but I think it’s because I love pineapple and she’s seen me eating it often enough. Next week I’m aiming for a vegetable!
With Sean working away I’ve not really been bothering much on the food front though I did make rice pudding last night as that is something junior will always eat. She won’t eat rice at any other time but stick it in a pudding and she’s happy! On Halloween (in lieu of a pumpkin, which we couldn’t find) we made some Zombie cupcakes with real zombie blood inside (aka jam).

Junior decorated hers with raisins and then ended up just eating the raisins because she didn’t like the jam inside! I tried to tell her it was only blood but that didn’t seem to help funnily enough. Never mind, I got to eat a lot of them so that was okay.
Due to my fondness for mushrooms I like to find different things to do with them (I mean edible things!!) and the latest favourite is a curried mushroom and tomato thing which reminds me of a takeaway dish I used to have in Blighty. As you’ll see from the picture I’m not heavy on the presentation side of things but as long as they taste good I don’t really care!

Sean will be back from Volos either today or tomorrow so hopefully I’ll have some more nice veggies to tinker with. If I make anything worthy I’ll let you know!!