I took Kanan, my 3-year-old son to the pediatrician for his annual check up this week.  The pediatrician says he is underweight, he has slipped off the growth chart, and that we should be concerned.  He has always been a small child, he has always hovered around 3rd-5th percentile in weight, but at this weigh-in, he slipped down to 0%.  The pediatrician basically said that all rules of healthy eating needs to go out the window, and that my son needs to eat the fattiest, heaviest, sweetest foods available, and he needs to do it quickly to get back on the chart.  She even recommended adding whey protein to his diet,  and to spoon feed him during meals if he loses interest in eating before finishing his meal.

This is, of course, such a slap in the face.  I have been trying so hard to make healthy and good foods that my kids will eat, and now someone, a medical doctor no less, is telling me I have to feed my son ice cream and bacon!  I wanted to cry.

Well, after I pulled myself together, I decided that there has to be a middle ground between what the doctor is suggesting, and what I can justify feeding my children.  So that night, I made this fun little avocado cup dish and paired with with roasted chicken leg and buttered yellow rice.  There is actually quite a bit of fat on this plate – but it is all healthy  fats, and I can still feed good about getting some veggies into my kids’ tummies.  The chicken and the yellow rice are both really easy to make, so I will focus on the avocado cups here and write a brief description of the drumsticks and rice at the end of this post.

Avocado Cup Fiesta

Makes 8 mini-salad cups; I’d estimate 2 halves or 1 full avocado per adult person/meal

• 1 cup black beans (from a can is fine, I used Goya), cooked, rinsed, drained
• Sweet peppers – stemmed and seeds removed, diced, quantity to taste.  For my meal I used 6 sweet peppers of varying colors, but you can use more
• 2 mini cucumbers – diced
• 1/4 cup diced white or red onion (I used white, but red is fine if you like a stronger onion flavor)
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice (from about 1 lime)
• 1/4 teaspoon coarse salt, plus more to taste
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
• Dashes of hot sauce or pinches of cayenne, to taste if you like it a little spicy
• Chopped cilantro or parmesan for garnish
• 4 ripe avocados (Make sure they are ripe!  The skin must be black on the outside, and the skin should give just a little bit when you press on it with your thumb)

Preparation

1. Remove the seeds and the stem from the sweet peppers.  Dice all the peppers, cucumbers, and onions.  There is no shame in using a chopper that dices everything into the same size for this recipe – in fact, it makes everything look way prettier.
2. Mix black beans, pepper, onion and  in a medium bowl. In a small dish, whisk olive oil, lime juice, salt, cumin and your choice of spicy heat. Adjust dressing seasonings to taste.
3. Don’t mix the dressing and the bean salad together until you are ready to eat, so that the veggies will stay crisp and will not taste soft or like they are overdressed.  When you are ready to eat this, go ahead and mix the dressing in with the salad and toss evenly.  Also, because avocados turn black after being exposed to air, only cut the avocados right before you are ready to serve.   Halve avocados and remove pits. With a small knife, score avocado halves with a knife, cutting lines in both directions to form a grid, but being careful not to through the skin.  If your avocados are ripe, this should be pretty easy to do.
4. Place the avocado halves on the plate that you will be serving before filling them.  If the avocado cups are just not sitting straight in the plate, you can slice a thin piece of the skin off the bottom so that it creates a flat surface for the avocado cups to rest on.  Put all of the other items you want on the plate first, and then fill the avocado cups with the salad filling.  Top with some cilantro or some parmesan cheese.  Eat with a spoon, and dig in!

Chicken Drumsticks recipe:

Place 4-5  drumsticks in a square baking dish.  Season the drumsticks with rosemary, soy sauce, white pepper, and push some crushed garlic under the skin of the drumsticks.   Loosely cover the baking dish with a piece of foil (there should be a noticeable gap on the sides of the foil where steam can escape). Bake at 400 degrees for 45 minutes.  After 45 minutes,  check the temperature of the drumsticks with a meat thermometer, the inside of the meatiest part of the leg should be at least 140 degrees.  Remove the foil and turn the drumsticks in the pan.  Bake for an additional 15 minutes without the foil cover to give the chicken a roasted appearance.  Cool before serving.  Reserve the drippings – I used it as a sauce over the drumsticks on the plate, but it can also be mixed into the yellow rice or saved for another future dish.

Buttered Yellow Rice:

Cook 2 cups of rice (most any kind of rice, I used medium grain, but you can also use long grain, or basmati or jasmine rice) as directed.  Place the cooked rice into a large pot over low heat.  Add 2 tablespoons of butter (or more, for my son’s diet I put in 4 tablespoons), and fold in about 2 teaspoon of yellow tumeric.  Add more tumeric if the rice seems too light in color – the more tumeric you use, the yellower your rice will be.  Keep folding the rice so that the rice on the bottom of the pot does not scorch.  Add onion powder, cumin, salt, pepper, a small pinch of paprika, and if you have any, chopped up chives or thinly sliced spring onions.  If the rice is too dry, add a few tablespoons of chicken broth to loosen it up.  Serve warm.