Cookie Ball?

Leo's sick AGAIN, and with this most recent illness (a respiratory bug of some kind, nothing too dramatic) came the return of my veggie panic.

I have a very difficult time getting Leo to eat vegetables, and a not insignificant amount of anxiety about how this affects his little immune system.  He eats his fill of fruit and avocado but I have to be really tricky to get him to consume greens.  I can usually sneak a few bites in at the beginning of a meal when he is hungry and eats with gusto without really looking at what he is putting in his mouth...but when he realizes that those are broccoli florets underneath that parmesan, he gives it the cold shoulder.  Perhaps I have committed that cardinal sin of accidentally urging him a little too hard to eat his veggies and he figured out that it was important to me and therefore a power play on his part.  He's a smart one, and I wear my heart on my sleeve.

Yesterday, with the arrival of actual fall-like weather in SoCal, I made a chicken noodle soup with lots of veggies including carrots and kale, and he liked that.  Success!  But today's lovely butternut squash/cream soup puree was offensive to his toddler sensibilities.  So, based on the recommendation of a friend, I tried a spinach muffin recipe from a popular kids' recipe blog which I won't insult by linking here and therefore forever associating the recipe author's webpage with the photo of my muffin disaster.

Because I have been cooking dinner on-the-reg for the past several months, and have become a pretty decent cook (ifIdosaysomyself), I have developed a false sense of cooking mastery, which carried over into this evening's baking.  The recipe included applesauce, and I was out, and I was desperate.  So I improvised.  With banana.  Oh, and I subbed agave for the sugar.  Which never really works in baking, I know, I know.  Really, "improvising," in general - not a good idea with baking.  Especially when you are baking something that is supposed to be disguising the flavor of Spinach.

Below, you can see photographic evidence of the resulting barely-sweet, rock-hard, spinach-scented, human-poo-resembling monstrosities:

I gave one to Leo after dinner as we were playing in the living room.  He looked at it, and then looked at me, and said, "Mama catch!"  Barely stifling my giggle, I said, "No, baby, that's not a ball, that's a cookie!"  He looked at it again, then back at me, and said, "Cookie ball?"

Oh well, tomorrow is a new day.  Parmesan broccoli, anyone?