Tricking Hubby at the Dinner Table

My ex-husband's mother served him liver and called it steak. I'm sure she did that to keep him healthy, but he never trusted anything someone else cooked for him when he grew up. He was always asking what was this or what was that in his food.

When I first married my new hubby, Tim, a sister-in-law of mine kept telling me that he actually eats plenty of vegetables that he always says he doesn't like or that he claims don't agree with him, so don't worry about it. She took me aside in the kitchen, explaining that he won't notice the tiny chopped -up mushrooms or zucchini on his plate. Once when I gave her a huge fresh zucchini from our garden, she called to say she had baked us delicious zucchini bread, and she had grated it so small that he won't notice. She warned me not to laugh when we tell him that it's actually walnut raisin bread, and I could barely tell it had zucchini in it, even though she assured me that it had one-and-a-half cups of zucchini in it.

After he had eaten a slice with his green tea, my Mother-in-Law told me that I should tell him that he just ate zucchini bread, not walnut raisin bread. I was too afraid to tell him but had not been brave enough to announce it to him then either. My Mother-in-Law told him, and he said he was not fooled but had noticed tiny green things in the bread. He was not angry, but I didn't think it would be good for our relationship if I fooled him into thinking he was never getting zucchini in anything. Yet, I had noticed that when we went shopping together and bought packages of stir-fried vegetables that also contained zucchini or mushrooms, he never got upset, but just picked them out. I saw that occasionally he did eat some of the smaller pieces that escaped his notice.

I'm not at all surprised that he did not get sick from these foods, but as a rule I do not sneak either mushrooms or zucchini into my hubby's meals. Firstly, I wouldn't want him announcing that he's not eating the dinner I worked hard to prepare, and secondly, I don't like to eat foods that I don't like or that don't agree with me. Besides, he eats quite a variety of vegetables, including carrots, onions, garlic, radishes, cucumber, broccoli, spinach, kale, and some greens that we've eaten together but that I had never eaten before we ate them together.

Although we have nice visits at my in-laws houses, my hubby brags about my cooking and claims to rarely get heartburn anymore. I figure he's right about the foods he avoids having given him heartburn, and we trust each other completely. I wouldn't want to spoil that!