“Chips and salsa?”
This is the way we are greeted by Abby as we walk in the door after a day at work. (To which a grown-up inevitably replies: “Thanks for asking! My day was great!”)
In theory we will be sitting down to dinner in 30 minutes, and in theory the girls should not be filling up on chips and salsa when it means broccoli consumption will surely suffer. But in practice, we — the starving grown-ups — can’t say no ourselves. So the four of us stand around (or sit on) the counter and wolf down a bowl of chips like wild animals. We’ve tried to leverage this weakness into something positive. There’s our “Chips-for-Details” deal which requires the girls to share one detail about their days (who they sat next to at lunch, what they chose at “free choice,” who was a cop at recess and who was a robber) before they are allowed to start dipping. And more recently there is our effort to capitalize on their love affair with the snack and roll it right into a healthy dinner. This entails assembling a spread like the one shown above (chips, salsa, shredded cheese, limes, avocado, cilantro) which will serve as the toppings to what they now call “taco soup.” The girls are allowed to grab one or two chips while I get the dinner ready.
For the recipe, please see chapter 2 of Dinner: A Love Story.
One dinner, two ways
