Cooking Chicken Chow Mein

     Maya doesn't particularly like vegetables or greens. A few weeks ago, I placed some small pieces of lettuce on her highchair tray. She considered the pile and then quickly shoved a handful into her mouth. I was encouraged for a moment, until her mouth opened and all the lettuce slowly dribbled out. Then she went back to eating her pasta and completely ignored the lettuce. She does this often with new foods.

     As a result, I've been considering new ways to prepare vegetables lately, with the hope that Maya will eat them more readily. Lisa got a book several months ago called First Meals: Fast, healthy, and fun foods for infants and toddlers.
In the 'Picky Eater' section, on page 111, there is a recipe for Chicken Chow Mein, which contains a variety of vegetables, including sugar snap peas and red pepper, which she had eaten sporadically in the past. I also thought the more exotic sauce would enhance the taste of the vegetables. So, I decided to make some for the family.

The preparation
     The only problem with the recipe was the number of ingredients: 12 for the main dish and 3 for the marinade. Toddlers feel no pressure to eat our cooking. The thought and effort behind the preparation is invisible to them. They become hungry, food appears, and they either eat it or complain until they get something they like. There is no guarantee that they will like or even try your food and they might just dump your cooking on the ground without an attempt to taste it. Occasionally though, you hit the mark, and you see the look of pure naive joy on your toddler's face. This is the excitement and frustration of feeding a toddler. As a result, I've learned to simplify as much as possible when cooking for Maya, as a way to reduce my risk.

     Instead of going by the explicit ingredients in the recipe, I bought chicken, shitake mushrooms, red peppers, sugar snap peas, whole wheat Chinese noodles and a pre-made Asian marinade that contains some of the ingredients from the marinade in the recipe. So I used 6 ingredients instead of 15. I cut up the chicken breast into thin slices and then sautéed it in the sauce. Then I sliced the vegetables into adult bite-sized pieces and pan fried them with oil, salt, pepper and garlic. At the same time, I cooked the noodles in a large pot with boiling, salted water. When everything was done, I mixed the chicken, vegetables and noodles in a large pot.

     Unfortunately, I didn't have quite enough sauce to completely cover the noodles and all these ingredients together were unwieldy and hard to turn. So, some sections of noodles had more sauce than others, but careful plating allowed me to disguise this unevenness. I put some chopped noodles in a small pink princess bowl for Maya and added small pieces of finely cut vegetables and chicken on top. Each piece was about the size of a Cheerio. I put the vegetables on top, so that she couldn't get to the noodles without also getting vegetables. I served much larger portions in large white bowls for me and Lisa.

The outcome
     Usually, we feed Maya in a high chair in the kitchen so that the food she drops lands on the easily cleanable hardwood floor. This time, we all sat around the table and pulled her highchair up, so that she could see us eating the new food she was about to try. Our family rarely eats simultaneously, unless we are in a restaurant, so this was a nice change of pace.

     Although Maya eyed her bowl tentatively when I first set it down on her tray, she dug in quickly after seeing me and Lisa eat. Then she proceeded to make a messy spectacle of her dinner, which was quite entertaining. We gave her a small fork but she ended up grabbing handfuls of noodles and stuffing them into her mouth, some of which hung there for the duration of dinner. We had a laugh at that. Eventually the noodles were every place. Her tray was completely covered and there were noodles all down the side of her high chair. (Cleaning tip: if you wait for noodles to dry, they become crisp and can be vacuumed more easily.) However, she was also clearly eating the vegetables, which seemed mostly gone after she was done.

     I enjoyed the taste of everything together. Although the flavor was probably too bland for a restaurant, the salty taste of the marinade, which had soy sauce as the main ingredient, was satisfying. The crunch of the sugar snaps peas contrasted nicely with the springiness of the noodles, which were similar to spaghetti, but with a slicker texture and thus more interesting to me. I sat there feeling good about this meal as I ate. It didn't hurt that Lisa kept saying, “Maya, look what daddy prepared for us!” Most nights we just feed Maya microwave food and packaged mush, as we hover over her in the kitchen. There is nothing wrong with that, but this was better.