“What my mother believed about cooking is that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.” (-Nora Ephron)

I have a theory about fussy eaters: if you get them personally involved in the cooking process itself, lo and behold, they sometimes actually wind up liking the food.

Take Joe, for instance: there are lots of foods he THINKS he dislikes. There’s only one food I can think of that I honestly don’t care for, and that’s turnips—(but if you put them in front of me, I’ll probably go right ahead and eat those, too.) I tend to crave variety, and I love veggies, fruits, salads,...and desserts. Experimenting in the kitchen is fun to me.

I’ve learned, though, that Joe kind of enjoys learning to cook, and when he does, he winds up liking what he fixes. If he’s near the kitchen, I’ll put him to work measuring, dicing, chopping, layering, and pouring with me, and now he’s got some of his own recipes down pat. Once, when I was on the road for work, he wanted to make home-made mac and cheese, so I told him he needed to make a roux first. He balked at me like I’d spoken in some strange dialect of Swahili and asked what that was. When I told him over the phone how easy it is to make a roux, he wrote it down, and now, he’s handing out his recipes to his kids, and naming his meals things like “Dad’s Killer Mac ‘n’ Cheese Casserole.” I told him now that he can make a roux, he has the basis for a lot of foods. I’ve heard him telling other people about how simple it is to make a roux. He’s even getting creative—instead of putting potato chips or bread crumbs on top of mac and cheese, he puts French fried onion rings on it, and it’s delicious. (Fattening...but delicious!) Now there's the sign of a confident cook--improvisation! Here he is with an ice ring he helped make for a holiday punch. (He wanted a photo!)

We both look for recipes in the Wednesday food section of newspapers, or in magazines, or online, and if something sounds good, we’ll put it in “our” cookbook. We slip recipes into plastic sheets in a looseleaf binder and we've made sections for “hors d’oeuvres,” “drinks,” “meals/casseroles,” “baking/desserts,” etc. And guess what? For the most part, Joe finds he now enjoys a lot of those foods he thought he didn’t…

“I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead. Not sick—not wounded—dead.” (-Woody Allen)