Food Glorious Food

In my infinite experinece with child rearing (today completes day 8) I have come to a few conclusions. One being that kids will eat anything that is bad for them. I think sugar coated lard sounds like a good idea to a 5 year old.
Tonight's dinner took an hour and a half. We have previously had some food issues, especially with vegetables. Last Wednesday's I can't swallow this lettuce at the penultamet piece comes to mind, but tonight was a doozie. Steak, grilled corn on the cob and salad where tonight's menu, and John did an excellent job of preparing it all. We serve in the kitchen so we manage our portions, so on the table were a plate of corn on the cob with 6 ears, a salad bowl with customized salads for us each, and a dinner plate with deliciously grilled ribeye already sliced.
She dove into the steak and pronounced it "The best steak I've ever eaten", even got a littl adventurous and tried the Pete Luger's steak sauce and liked it. At this point I'm feeling like tonight will be a piece of cake. After her steak was gone, she went onto an ear of corn, after taking 5 minutes to butter the one ear she slowly picked her way over it, while letting us know that spray butter should definitley be on our next grocery list. After she was done, she was finished and talking about dessert.
Wait....there's no dessert without eating your salad. "Oh, I don't like tomatoes", that's OK I responded eat around them. And that's when it happened.....the showdown at the OK corral. After the 10 minutes of convincing her that she could not have anything else before she finished her salad she started poking at it. There were surprisingly no tears through the next 45 minutes of salad eating. John and I sat there and conversed with and without her. Did not get mad, John only got up from the table to feed the dogs (who were 3o minutes late by this point). After 25 minutes of picking I pointed out that with 5 large bites she could be done, then made each bite a victory. By 8:25pm we were done with dinner, and John was frustrated, but didn't show it.
She got to bed late, that's our fault, we could have handled the situation differently, we could have eaten earlier; But I am pleased with the fact that there were no meltdowns, no yelling, no tears, just some good hearted ribbing. Since tonight took so long she won't have her homemade blueberry muffins tomorrow morning, and she doesn't know that. I know it's not a big consequence, but we never told her there was one. Next time will be different, today was all about boundaries and I think we are all still learning where those are.