Eat Your Spherified Vegetables!

In an effort to expand his palate, I’ve followed the standard parenting guidelines without much luck: I keep putting veggies on his plate, even if he won’t eat them; I eat lots of them myself; and I regularly cook with him. I’ve even tried the morally questionable practice of sneaking veggies into his favorite dishes (a la Jessica Seinfeld). The Critic—as I like to call him—was not so easily fooled: He quickly detected a quarter cup of squash in his salmon cakes the other night and declared them strange. Frustrated but not yet willing to give up, I enlisted the help of an unlikely accomplice: El Bulli chef Ferran Adria. Adria is perhaps the most famous chef in the world, known as a leader in the field of “molecular gastronomy”— a kind of kitchen alchemy that transforms prime ingredients into surreal concoctions using high-tech tools and commercial food additives.