"This would be at least $18 in a restaurant. Will you both please just try it?" I pleaded to my hungry girls, placing the grilled asparagus and goat cheese frittata beneath their synchronized sneers.
"Nobody would pay for this, Dad."
"Yeah, Dad."
Faith, 7, and Sydney, 10, couldn't care less that their father has cooked for rock stars, presidents and Hollywood elite.
My food, despite my professional culinary experience, has just as good a chance of making it to their stomachs as any other parent's. Yet some adults feel that I, a single parent with picky kids, may hold the answer to one of the universe's most pondered questions: How do you get children to eat anything that doesn't involve a cardboard box or a delivery person?
Divorced for three years, I have my girls half the time. Their mother (with whom I have a great relationship) has a different approach to feeding them. I don't have the patience to cook three different dishes at every meal. Nor did my mother have that patience for me.
Mom saw me as a fussy eater. I wasn't – I just didn't like her cooking. She was adventurous, constantly trying new and exotic recipes, but she struggled with the ethics of consuming meat – one day we were vegetarians, the next not – so she never mastered meat or vegetables.
As Australians we were spoiled by our country's bountiful produce, and whenever Mom applied a lighter touch I could ease up on the ketchup. That taught me to let the ingredients do the work. And she cooked with such passion it was impossible not to take an interest in food.
Fast-forward a generation. My girls have unpredictable tastes. Faith loathes pasta but will sneak a jar of capers to her room and polish off the lot. Sydney loves sashimi, even eel and mackerel, but can't stand poultry. To further stack the odds against myself, as a 44-year-old male chef, I refuse to create smiley faces out of crudités and hummus. A julienne pepper is not an eyebrow.
There are, however, two things Faith and Sydney adore: sugar, and any device with a screen. I try to keep sugar on lockdown. The screen, though, has turned out to be my greatest ally in getting them to eat. Rather than dress up their food to make it look cute, I make them part of the meal-planning process – which makes them more likely to bring fork to mouth later.
Sydney loves surfing the Web while Faith gawks at the screen in astonishment of how "big sis is soooo good on the Internets!" But they can only use Daddy's laptop on the condition that it's (mostly) for determining our meals.
Sydney browses on the Jamie Oliver website and, as long as Faith agrees, they can select our dinners for the week. Well, they pick the pictures. If it's a recipe I don't like the look of, or it seems like too much work, I'll occasionally tell a white lie about an ingredient being out of season or too expensive. More often than not, though, we all agree.
Faith, under Syd's dictation, then scratches down the shopping list, typically with a blunt crayon. This is the hairiest part of the process. If I'm forced to go freestyle when we're at the supermarket because Faith can't read her own writing, and the resulting dinner doesn't resemble "Jamie's picture," it's a meltdown.
Mostly while we shop, my role is pleasantly relegated to chauffeuring the cart while occasionally policing enthusiastic outbursts for end-of-aisle high-fructose breakfast cereals.
Three birds with one stone, right? Responsible computer use, enthusiasm for food and learning about ingredients, the latter two lessons passed on from my mother. But the reality is not quite so Disney-perfect. I still struggle with wanting to appease their tedious taste buds, and occasionally fantasize about force-feeding them like farm ducks destined to produce foie gras.
In their defence, the "$18 frittata" had not been vetted by Jamie Oliver, as it was a recipe I had created for a magazine. When we follow the established protocols and, after sufficient tasting, dinner is still deemed inedible, I begrudgingly resort to cereal. With one condition – they need to articulate what they don't like about it. I refuse to toss good food without at least a little learning.
I'd say 60 per cent of the time they'll eat what I've cooked. The other week they ate Brussels sprouts – that's got to bump me up to 65 per cent. Those are odds I can live with.