Lesson Thirteen: Everything's Better With Bacon....Or Onions

In our house, we have a saying about food:  Everything's better with bacon.  Not surprisingly, we aren't vegetarians.  As far as eating goes, my daughters are pretty adventurous.  They will never turn down pizza of course, but will always try whatever I make and in general eat quite a few things that I don't see many tween girls enjoying.

We recently went out to lunch and waded through a salad bar.  As we are taking a look at each other's choices, my daughter tells me that she doesn't like onions.  "What do you mean, you don't like onions?  I put onions in everything I cook.  Remember the pasta I made last week--onions.  The chicken tacos we had---onions.  The mushroom soup that is your favorite---onions."  She was stunned.

I don't hide ingredients in food.  I know some parents do this so that they can get their kids to eat in a more nutritious way, but I don't.  If I want to put onions or garlic or broccoli or anything else in food, I just do.  The girls can eat it or choose not to, but I don't change my recipes for them.  I find that there are times when they pick through ingredients, but for the most part I think if they are used to seeing it, they just eat it.  (My kids love broccoli, by the way.)  I was a little surprised therefore, that she was stunned.  We have onions in our kitchen at all times.  Where does she think they go?  I tried to explain to them that garlic and onions are used in many, many foods to jumpstart the flavor.

When we got home, I found my girls pouring through a kid's cookbook that they have asking if they could make dinner.  I'm not going to turn that down since I am generally the one who cooks in our family.  They rejected several options since I told them they needed to choose something that we already had all the ingredients to make.  They finally made a choice:

What was the first line of the ingredients?   1/2 cup of chopped onion

Lesson Thirteen:  Everything's better with bacon....or onions.