Announcing my new culinary philosophy:

It's founded on a triad of ancient but previously underappreciated cookery principles: (a) laziness (b) short stature and (c) wrong ingredients. Here's how it works:

Step 1. Take your toddler or small child to the grocery store/farmer's market. Decide that you really cannot be arsed to try and plan the next week's meals in any kind of coherent, nutritious way. Also it occurs to you that maybe if you just let the toddler choose the vegetables, (s)he will be marginally more cooperative when it comes to actually eating them.

Step 2. Arrive at the produce section. Tell your toddler/small child they can have WHATEVER THEY WANT in this section, as long as it fits in the bag/cart/basket and as long as you do not already have quantities of whatever it is already turning fuzzy and grey in the fridge/fruit bowl at home.  Minimal parental input is the key to keeping this part exciting, both for the toddler/small child and for you.

Step 3. Note that they will be limited to what they can reach (see the crucial part about short stature), so they won't be able to buy several pounds of out-of-season chanterelle mushrooms at $49.99/lb, for instance, or any of the other gourmet spendy things that tend to be kept on upper shelves.

Step 4. Take it all home and let it sit in the fridge for a couple of days while you have the flu and can't get it together to do anything more exciting than soup-tin-opening, toast-making, tea-brewing, and self-pity.

Step 5. Open the fridge and ask yourself what on God's green earth are you going to do with: a bunch of lacinato kale, a kabocha squash, a red cabbage the size of your head, 23 carrots, one onion, three zucchini, and a cucumber. Hurrah for the internet!

Step 6. Find a recipe for which you have about two thirds of the ingredients, and replace the remaining third with other stuff that needs to be finished anyway (no lemon juice? how about a glassworth of prosecco that has been going flat for the last month! No flax oil? how about some sesame oil that is definitely older than your child? No almonds to toast? Let's find out at what temperature pistachios will set off the smoke alarm! Etc.) Incompetence and a sense of adventure are very important at this step.

Step 7. Bon appetit! I had a completely delicious salad tonight for dinner which I would have paid CASH MONEY for in a restaurant, had I had any inkling how delicious roast kabocha, kale, red cabbage, flat prosecco, grapefruit juice, slightly burnt pistachios, crunched up seed crackers, sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, cucumber, and a few raisins could be. Next time I might even save some for the small child...