How To Please The Toughest Food Critics Around

Editor's note: Beginning Wednesday, July 27, Tales of a Tireless Mom will run every Wednesday at 12 p.m., replacing Mom Talk.

Every foodie parent has been there.

You find a recipe for a great dinner or see a special at the store that will be PERFECT for your family meal. You chop, sauté and measure. You stir and whisk and might even shout “BAM!” if no one is watching. As you plate your culinary masterpiece and wait for the chorus of “yummmmms” that is sure to follow, the rain starts to fall on your parade.

“I don’t like it.”

“What’s this green stuff?”

“Can I have cereal instead?”

Try though I may, there are so few of my great dishes that the kids absolutely love. I mean, they eat lots of things that I make them, but for the most part it’s pasta with butter and cheese (yawn), ham sandwiches with mayonnaise and raw vegetables (ho hum) or the aforementioned bowl of cereal. Oh, the humanity!

Now I should clarify: I am a Bon Appétit Magazine, Food Network and Top Chef devotee. While far from a gourmet chef, I adore finding recipes and getting a chance to make a really great meal. I love taking an idea and adding or substituting a few ingredients so that my family will love it. Perhaps it’s my competitive nature that inspires me to use ingredients like mussels or fennel in hopes of getting my children to ask for seconds (the cooking equivalent of a increasing your degree of difficulty). Call me crazy, but serving them pasta with butter and cheese just feels like a copout.

For a dinner earlier this week, I thought I had a winner. The older kids requested pasta (you would think we lived in Rome) and I knew that my toddler would love it. I added what I had – fresh corn that I steamed and cut off the cob - and farm stand tomatoes. I found some gorgeous Mozzarella and let it melt in. I snipped a few leaves of fresh basil from our yard and added some Kalamata olives (I knew Ben would eat around them but Georgia and Quinn would be fine). I finished it with some breadcrumbs, a little pasta water, salt, pepper and Parmesan.

In a word: DELICIOUS.

What’s more, it looked completely harmless. It had barely any basil and just one small tomato… almost identical to the bland and boring pasta that they love so much. Think of my dish, “Farfalle Primavera a la Mamma,” as the more sophisticated and well-dressed older sibling to Pasta de Dullsville. As I passed out the bowls to the kids and layered a little more Parmesan on top (some might say “to hide the veggies”), you can guess what happened.

“Can I get plain pasta?”

“What’s the green stuff?”

“I don’t like this kind.”

I will continue to shake off these little speed bumps on the road to childhood culinary sophistication and keep trying new things to serve them. I’ll remember those little victories (the time they had seconds on Halibut or ate a summer squash and eggplant ragout, thinking it was “meat”) and use them to spur me on and keep searching for ways to expand their immature palates.

In the meantime though, I’ll buy a 20 pound case of butter and some stock in Barilla. Something tells me that Pasta de Dullsville will be on the Shumway specials list for months to come.