My first book for 9-12 year olds, TROUBLE WITH PARSNIPS, made for some extremely casual (be kind, people!) meals at my house.

Winter is coming, as they say, and the attention span for cooking vegetables is getting shorter. The garden is closing down and the holiday shopping list is ramping up!

So, I have a suggestion:

TADA!!!

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The Veggie of the Week Challenge

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To keep my family from becoming poor and wan while I work on my second book, I’m committing to serve up a half-way healthy*, cheap, vegetable dish to the exacting pool of eaters at my house once a week.

Feel free to play along in the comments! Go ahead, show me how it’s done. Your inspiration is welcome!!!

Here are the “rules”:

—No recipes will appear here in their entirety. Forget the step-by-step! You are artistes, are you not? (I can’t follow recipes, but I’ll let you know if I refer to any.)

—No holds barred. If the crew gives the thumbs down or orders out for pizza, you’ll get the details here.

—At least one inexpensive vegetable must appear in the meal. (Honor of an epidemiologist!)

*half-way healthy means an attempt at lower fat and whole grains will be made, but cream and cheese will inevitably appear. You’ve been warned.

Our first vegetable victim was cauliflower.

The run-down: 1 whole cauliflower broken into flowerets, the least expensive Swiss cheese available, grated, the quiche formula from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest cookbook, modified for my giant quiche dish.

Quiche crust from a food processor cookbook I got from the library once (mea culpa!): 1 1/2 Cups flour, 1 stick frozen butter cut into pieces, whirr it up and add 1/4 C water you put in the freezer for a few minutes. Press the crumbs onto the sides and bottom of your pan and make a decorative edge to keep it from burning. Wanted to add red pepper for color but no time, so I sprinkled paprika on top.

Half-way healthy: Buttermilk instead of milk to fool *cough* family into thinking they were getting cream. Added chopped parsley from windowbox into crust (Vitamin C) and put in 1/2 C whole wheat flour with 1 C white flour.

Cheap: No expensive ingredients. (What?! You want me to show my receipts?)

The vote: Thumbs up!

Will they make it through the holidays? Tune in weekly to find out.