Which brings me to the experiment my family took to calling Operation 30 Days. The idea was simple: We'd cook a brand-new dinner every night for a month—brand-new to me and Andy and brand-new to the girls. We'd plan the menus a few days in advance. We'd keep the meals easy during the week and get slightly more ambitious on the weekends. If, at the end of 30 days, we only added five meals to the list, did it matter? At least we'd be exposing them to new things ... and eating well ourselves.
To get the kids on board, we settled on a strategy I would describe as "extreme enthusiasm." We spun the project as a Big Fun Experiment (!!!) with only one rule: They had to try a single bite of something new every night. And if they stopped at one bite? We had a plan for that, too: Every meal was "deconstructable," built on at least one ingredient the girls already liked, so they would always have something to eat. Take Dinner #6, for example: orecchiette with sausage and broccoli. Phoebe, my pasta hater, ended up eating only the sausage and broccoli, while Abby, my sausage hater, ate only the broccoli and pasta. (Mom and Dad, by the way, ate a meal destined to become a player in the 2008 rotation.)
Our culinary victories were the result of both small shake-ups (fish tacos on homemade tortillas—Dinner #9—are not even close to being the same meal as fish tacos on store-bought tortillas) and ambitious ones (I'll never forget the sight of my former soupanthrope, Phoebe, inhaling fish stew, Dinner #22). They were measured in different degrees of success (bacony Brussels sprouts on top of chicken paillard—Dinner #10—still had me in a first-crush daydream 24 hours later, even though my daughters barely touched it) and different degrees of failure (we were thrilled when they both tried lentils without the usual just-sucked-a-lemon look of revulsion).
But in the end, whether a given dish fell into the win or loss column was beside the point. The experiment brought back a part of my life I had been starting to wonder if I'd ever get back. It was the reason I began obsessing again over all those never-cooked dog-eared recipes in my cookbooks. And the reason, one January night during my commute, I found myself in a rapid-fire Treo exchange with my husband about the preparation of a lamb chop (Dinner #28). And finally, the reason I was so happily reminded of the adage that kids really are more receptive to new ideas than their parents ever think they'll be.
Next Page: How to Bust a Family Dinner Rut
