Food snobbery

R has recently developed a liking for salad. This makes me ridiculously happy. Much happier than her adoration of all things ice-cream related makes me sad or guilty.

It is especially ridiculous because she is actually a pretty healthy eater, anyway, and has been eating most of the constituent parts of salad for a year and a half, at least. It’s just the leaves she’s shunned, really.

She’ll happily eat a bowlful of cherry tomatoes or cucumber sticks. Given the opportunity, she would devour two or three cans of sweetcorn a day. She’s perfectly at home with peppers, raw or cooked, and has even deigned to munch on a stick of celery.

But she’s never taken to the whole combination known as salad. Until a few days ago, when I chopped it up small and drowned it in mayonnaise. Now, her response to the question ‘Do you want salad with dinner?’ is ‘Oh, yes please!’ and, instead of uttering the universal condemnation of the under-10s, ‘Yuk’, when a bowl of salad is placed next to her dinner, she says ‘Ooh, salad! Yummy, yummy!’ and polishes it off before even glancing at the pasta.

Of course, my over-reaction may well be related to my being a die-hard vegetarian. In the veggie-carnivore (yes, I know, it’s technically omnivore) fight to dominate our daughter’s culinary affections, the green stuff is winning. Yay!