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Of course the kids will like tortellini, right?

Tortellini salad prepared by My Daughter's Kitchen students at the Neighborhood Center in Camden, March 8, 2017.
Tortellini salad prepared by My Daughter's Kitchen students at the Neighborhood Center in Camden, March 8, 2017.Read moreSteven M. Falk

I thought I had a home run. Tricolor tortellini salad. With citrus vinaigrette. And a few kid-friendly vegetables -- peas, carrots, zucchini, cherry tomatoes -- added to the mix.

But, alas, there are no sure-thing homers with kids and vegetables.

To all the parents who try desperately to coax their children to eat vegetables, this week especially, I feel your pain.

The mission of My Daughter's Kitchen -- the after-school cooking classes modeled after lessons I taught my own daughter -- has always been to persuade students how easy it is to cook for themselves. To demonstrate how much cheaper and healthier home cooking is when compared to high-salt, high-fat take-out. The kicker, in theory, is that the dishes taste so good the kids want to go home and cook for themselves and their families.

I thought pasta filled with cheese would be the easy part, and that the vegetables would be gobbled up along with it. But none of the students at the Neighborhood Center in Camden where we are cooking had eaten tortellini before. And no one was excited about trying it with zucchini, tomatoes, carrots, and peas.

I'd been here before. In the urban schools where volunteers are joining me to teach cooking to 200 children, many of them have little interest in and limited access to fresh vegetables.

But once they get involved in the cooking and then taste the food, they often change their minds. I remained optimistic.

Before we got started, I tried my best to sell the benefits: Eating vegetables instead of junk food is so good for your brains and your bodies. It will make you feel better and prevent diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, I told them.

And I stressed the value: It cost less than $15 to make this salad that would feed six, $2.50 per person.

From the start, there was much enthusiasm for the dinner prep.

Ajane Cates, 13, and Ajaliq Ortiz, 13, got into a rhythm, cheerfully peeling zucchini into ribbons and grating carrots at the prep table, singing over and over a song from a Nickelodeon show: "Chop, chop, chop the squid," they sang, giggling endlessly.

Yasir McCargo, 9, set a pot of water on the stove for the tortellini, waited patiently for it to boil, then added the pasta and stirred it, perhaps a bit too much, while it cooked.

Asiyah Miller, 9, was delighted to zest and squeeze the lemon -- "I love the smell," she said -- before mixing it with the olive oil for the vinaigrette. And Ajaliq expertly turned the zucchini strips in the skillet to soften them up.

After all the vegetables were ready, and the tortellini was drained and cooled, we tossed everything together and added the vinaigrette. It was clear to me that the dish was not the best it could be. The pasta was overcooked, on the edge of mushy, and the zucchini had also spent too much time in the skillet. The lemon zest and juice and olive oil was perfect to my taste, but we needed more of it, and someone had thrown out the lemon. We improvised with the juice of an orange and a little more olive oil.

It was not perfect, but it was still pretty yummy. But not a single one of the five children liked, or ate, the dinner.

Ajaliq ate a few pieces of tortellini. Asiyah explained that she didn't really eat vegetables. The others tasted it to be polite, but the evidence was on the plate, and the plates were mostly untouched. One child actually turned the plate into the trash can.

I tried not to take it personally, but that is the first time in four years of cooking classes that no one liked the dinner. My home run had turned into a strikeout.

Thankfully, there were plenty of others at the Neighborhood Center who were happy to have a plate. The janitor enthusiastically accepted a portion and declared it delicious. Yasir's little brother had a plate, and Ajane's grandmother stopped by for a helping. Asiyah's mother took leftovers home.

And though it was discouraging that none of the students liked the dinner, there was good news to celebrate: Yasir had cooked scrambled eggs at home, a dish we'd cooked in class the week before. "My sister helped me," he said proudly.

I was also happy to learn that, according to the reports from volunteers at the other schools, the dish was not a complete shutout. There were plenty of kids who sang its praises.

"Mmmm ... this is really good!" said Layla Bevan at Comly Elementary. "I can't tell my mom I'm eating this," said another Comly student, Matt Dumyak, "because then she'll always make me eat my vegetables!"

At the Gesu School in Philadelphia, everyone was skeptical, their teacher reported. Some had never tasted tortellini, and those who had had eaten it only with a creamy sauce. But the dish was better than they imagined. "The tortellini was great," said Leaha Grandy. She wanted to know where she could buy the pasta to make it at home.

At Urban Promise in Camden, Nyla Hannah was especially enthusiastic. "I am having zucchini for the first time, and I love these peas!"

The group at Chester Eastside devoured their tortellini creation, their teacher reported, especially enjoying the tanginess from the lemon juice and the zest. "This could be my dinner for the next 100 days," announced Shanyah Womack.

My Daughter's Kitchen