I have something to share with you.

I wanted to find a way for my daughter to try more foods.  Dinner had to be more fun.  The no-thank you bite worked well for a while but now at five, she announced she had already tried everything.  So, I offered the following to my five year old daughter.

Every Monday night, we will do Rainbow Dinner. She gets to pick three colors from the rainbow and I have to make a dinner that has those colors. The catch – she must eat everything. No excuses.

For the first dinner, I should have known that she would choose the three hardest colors. Green, NO. Red, NO. Yellow, NO.  My daughter chose pink, purple and blue.  So now I am thinking, I am crazy.  This is going to take more time and effort than I thought.  Great job Mom – you really thought this one through.  

Create a dinner with pink, purple and blue – Hmm. Well, pink was not too hard. Beets(more dark pink than red), pink lemonade for a drink(is that cheating?), a cream sauce made from marinara(I think that is more orange). Shrimp – scratch that, she doesn’t like shrimp. Maybe not so easy. Purple – got it. Eggplant, or even better, purple cauliflower. She has never tried that before.  Note to self – I must make a trip to Whole Foods or Central Market for that one. Blue – what vegetable is blue? What meat is blue? What fish is blue? Blueberries – but how do I make that part of dinner? Fruit salad?

Thank you to Pinterest for allowing me to search rainbow foods, rainbow dinner, rainbow recipes.  And off to the food store I went.

Fresh pasta-check.  Food coloring – check.  Purple cauliflower – check.  Chicken for her – check.  Shrimp for me and the husband – check. (Must have some meat or fish, right?) Sauce-check.  Some brilliant person figured out that you can use food coloring on PASTA.  It looks really cool but I will admit, my fingers are still a shade of purple from the pink and blue combining on my hands.  It was a VERY time consuming dinner to have to steam the cauliflower, cook the pasta(although the fresh pasta did save time), make individual bags of food coloring to dye the pasta, rinse the pasta, use another pan to cook the shrimp and chicken(Yes – my Rachel Ray pan) and then make the sauce.  Then I had to put it all together.

The end result:
Pink, Purple and Blue Rainbow Pasta with Purple Cauliflower and Grilled Chicken. My daughter’s huge smile showed her excitement and she ate the entire meal(I knew the  pasta would be a hit but she ate all of the purple cauliflower – YEAH!).  She even picked her colors for next week and wow, was I happy to hear them – red, orange and yellow.  (sigh of relief!)

Mission Accomplished!!