It’s quiet.

Not a murmur, not a word. Just the rhythmic sound of two forks being taken from bowl to mouth.

The Monkeys are eating two bowls of sushi. This is their favourite dinner at the moment. Not daintily rolled between a sushi bamboo mat, instead carefully constructed by their own little hands. I get it all out, prepare the ingredients and then they assemble what they would like to go in there.

Healthy, looks good, they get to help put it together and most of all they love to eat it.

I can’t help but feel a teeny bit pleased. Pleased and proud of my vegetable loving children. Sure they won’t touch zucchini, mushrooms, sweet potato or spinach. Eggplant also isn’t getting a look in any time soon, but what they won’t eat- they make up for. If that means a bowl full of sushi, with a selection of raw vegetables in there, I’m more than happy to give it to them.

I know kids can be picky little things, but if you plant the seeds of eating healthily from the very beginning and get them involved it sets them up for later on. Once a week, the Monkeys wrestle over who gets to bring in the vegetable box after it’s been delivered to our back door. Carefully sorting what’s in there and what exactly it all is. We don’t get to harvest a great deal from our (rather pathetic at the moment) plant pots, so this along with going to farmer’s markets is a second best. Sorting, learning, preparing and then eating it.

As a child, the idea of sitting through an eggplant or mushroom dish set me up for an hours worth of good solid gagging. These truly were horror vegetables that were put on this earth just to torture me. A few decades on and funnily enough what are two of my favourite vegetables?… Eggplant and mushrooms. The seed had been planted, the palate had already been explored, and then it was just a matter of finding out how I liked to eat those two little vegetables.

So that’s what I’m doing with The Monkeys. Expanding their palates and planting seeds. No, they don’t have to eat handfuls of mushrooms, broccoli, and zucchini. They can try a little bit each time though, just so to remember what it tastes like and then they can move on to what they really love. Vegetables like peas, capsicum (peppers), tomatoes, cucumber, corn, avocado, lettuce, pumpkin and carrot. Pop it all in a bowl of rice, with some shredded seaweed and a little line caught tuna, (Good Fish.)

There they have, a bowl full of sushi.