If you’ve been reading from the beginning, you might remember the quesadilla incident. Bean quesadillas, eaten every single day for two weeks, loved completely by both children, then one day declared disgusting and never touched again. That was back in the early posts, when I was still in the phase of thinking that finding one thing they’d eat was the same as solving the problem.
The quesadillas are back.
It started with the kids asking for quesadillas a few weeks ago. Fine. I made them - plain, just cheese, the approved version. They ate them and then immediately complained they weren’t full. This is a familiar dynamic: eat only the thing with approximately zero nutritional value, then be surprised by hunger. I’ve learned not to say this out loud.
So I did something I’ve been doing more of lately. I made beans.
My version is simple: black beans, kidney beans, and lentils, mixed, with diced onion cooked down in a pan with a little garlic. That’s it. I put them in the quesadillas alongside the cheese and didn’t make an announcement about it. Both kids ate them. Both kids asked for more.
I considered this a quiet win and moved on.
The following week my wife tried to make the same thing. She used just the beans - plain, no onion, no garlic - and the kids weren’t interested. Polite refusal, the diplomatic version of the look.
This got my problem-solving brain going in a way that dinner rarely does anymore.
I made two batches. One plain, exactly as my wife had made them. One my way, with what I like to call “flavor.” I didn’t tell the kids which was which. I just put half quesadilla of each in front of them and asked what they thought.
Both of them preferred mine. Clearly, without hesitation.
Then my daughter found something unholy in her quesadilla. A piece of onion - not large by any reasonable adult standard, but apparently enormous by the standards of a nine-year-old conducting a quesadilla inspection. She held it up. She looked at me. “I hate onion,” she said, with the gravity of someone making a formal declaration of war.
She then spent the next ten minutes performing surgery on her quesadilla, scraping out anything that wasn’t at least roughly spherical. She did not, however, switch to the plain batch. She still preferred mine, onion and all, as long as the onion wasn’t visible.
I did not point this out.
The next time I made beans, I cut the onion smaller. Cooked it down a little longer, until it had basically disappeared into the beans. Neither child could find anything to object to. They ate until I was genuinely concerned about my son’s relationship with cheese, which he had requested in quantities that I can only describe as ambitious.
My daughter, meanwhile, wanted beans only. No cheese. Just beans in a tortilla, which is technically just a bean wrap, but I have learned not to name things. I added approximately 17 pieces of shredded cheese, just to hold the thing together, thinking she couldn’t possibly have a problem with that.
I was wrong.
She scraped every sliver of cheese out of that quesadilla.
The practical upshot of all this is that I now make beans in large batches ahead of time and keep them in the fridge. Heat them up, quesadillas in ten minutes, both kids fed and actually full. It has become one of those rare things in this house: an easy win.
I didn’t think I’d be writing that sentence about beans. But here we are.