Welcome to Eat Your Food! It's our recipe column with real meals for real kids. This broccoli and cheddar quesadilla may just make a believer out of your kids—and the spicy pico de gallo keeps it interesting for adventurous kids and adults alike.

Photography Credit: Nick Evans

Welcome to Eat Your Food!, our new biweekly column of real meals made for real kids by Nick Evans!

Broccoli is a stereotypical “difficult food” for kiddos, but I have to admit that my three-year old actually loves broccoli and will eat it most days.

This may or may not have to do with the fact that I told him that LeBron James eats A LOT of broccoli. (I don’t know if this is true or not. Lies are fine at the dinner table, people.)

Despite the fact that I just told you lies at the dinner table are okay (in the name of good nutrition—let me clarify!), I tend to not love recipes that “sneak” veggies into other things. I like my kids to know they are eating veggies and learn, instead, through constant exposure and hounding, to love them.

It’s sort of working.

So, while I tell my kids these are “Trees and Cheese” quesadillas, they don’t hide anything. They are stuffed full of blanched broccoli and cheddar cheese. I do recommend chopping the broccoli pretty finely so it mixes in with the cheese and there are no huge bites of veggies. That just makes it easier for little mouths to eat these quesadillas.

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THE DAD ADD

To kick these quesadillas up a notch for the adults, I like to mince up a quick, fresh pico de gallo. It’s spicy and bright, and cuts through the trees and cheese. The other easy Dad Add here would be hot sauce, obviously, but this pico is only a little extra work for a lot of extra texture and flavor. It makes the quesadilla a full meal for me.

Bonus points if you can get your kiddos to try the pico on a corner of quesadilla or a spare tortilla chip!

REPORT CARD

I served these Trees and Cheese Quesadillas to my 3 1/2-year old boy and my 19-month old daughter.

My son, the usual broccoli lover, ate one segment, said it was good, and then had to go attend to his fire truck. So it goes.

My daughter ate exactly zero bites of the quesadilla, but did eat all of the avocado and painted the sour cream on the table in the shape of the letter F. She doesn’t know her letters yet . . . or does she?! She hates any food right now that isn’t dairy or fruit, so this is about right.

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