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An over-the-top menu helps sell the family dinner

Parents don’t realize it, but they have a powerful skill in their arsenal to get their kids to eat. It isn’t encouraging them to lend a hand in the kitchen or starting a backyard garden or recreating favorite restaurant dishes. Those are good strategies, but this is even easier. It’s selling what’s on the line-up in the first place. How does an overwrought parent do this? By using the same technique deployed by restaurants everywhere: describing food with the kind of goofy, flowery language that makes it sound irresistible.

A couple of years ago, I blogged about this idea and heard from numerous readers about how much they liked it, so I’m bringing it back for my final Back-to-School installment. The goofy menu is not just an exercise in allowing yourself to seem ridiculous in front of your children (which I relish). There’s also a practical side. Creating a typed and posted menu full of delicious-sounding food forces you to plan, shop and cook. Once it’s posted on the corkboard, you’re committed. And posting it using funny descriptors means decreasing the possibility of pushback from finicky participants.

Keep things interesting by naming dishes after children, their friends or other family members. Include breakfast. Designate a night for take-out or for kids being in charge of the cooking. And, let young people practice their own descriptive powers by writing the menu themselves.

Do I do this faithfully every week? Of course not. As the school year rocks along, I become a colossal failure at just about everything related to parenting. But I do find that I have better success at mealtime when I scribble down a fun menu. It’s a simple exercise that will produce positive results.

For more food news and to submit Spatula Diaries ideas, follow me on Twitter @mhrwriter.