Fennel and orange salad for kids

It is a boring kind of family meal I know. Why is she blogging about every day pork sausages and salad you wonder? well let me tell you why.

It was Wednesday of last week, I'd done half the shopping but hadn't managed to get to the fruit and veg shop down the road so when it came to whipping up dinner on Wednesday night after swimming lessons all I had in the fridge was some yummy pork sausages, zucchini, onion and an orange.... or so I thought.
Come on! I thought to myself, if I serve zucchini and onions to the boys I'll hear nothing but complaints (it was a hot and humid day so I was not interested in complaints!). We had got back from swimming late so I knew I didn't have long to whip up dinner, in fact Alex hasn't been able to last long enough to eat with us, so all I managed to give him before he fell a sleep was a sausage, carrot sticks, orange slices and bread- really healthy!
While the sausages were cooking I managed to find a tub of cherry tomatoes and hidden beneath the zucchini was a fennel bulb. Without even thinking about Max and his likes and dislikes of fennel (I knew he disliked cooked fennel) I began to make a salad of cherry tomatoes, orange segments and shaved fennel because that was all I had going, bar a few carrot sticks.
It hadn't even hit me that Max might not like fennel until I was tossing the salad and he came up and asked me what the white stuff was?' Umm, it's.....shaved fennel' I said 'it absorbs the orange flavour, you'll love it'.
Sitting down for dinner I think I was holding my breath waiting to see if he ate his dinner without complaint- VICTORY!
Max devoured the salad and even said he liked it, how cool was that. If I had had a fridge full of other veggie stuff he liked I wouldn't of even given the shaved fennel a second thought so I have taught myself something very valuable- don't get stuck in the family vegetable rut of carrots, corn and beans, lash out a little, try something new a few different ways and if it still gets rejected then perhaps then and only then I will come to the conclusion they really don't like the stuff.
So note to self:
 Max likes fennel raw, hates fennel cooked.
Alex hates fennel raw, cooked or even being in the house.....he has a few years to go before I give up on him completely!