Ah, I have tried getting him to help me cook. He's enjoyed it every time. Unfortunately he only accepts the finished dish if it's already a meal he will eat. If there are unfamiliar/undesired things in it, helping cook it holds no truck with him when he sits down to eat it.
We don't have room for a garden at our home (apartment in a city with three windows total, all of which face an alley, so...), but I, my DH, and my MIL have all invited him to choose the individual vegetables we buy when we go to the grocery store/farmstand. Sometimes he even tries to eat them in the store! But when it comes time to actually sit down and eat them in a meal at home? Again, no dice. I'm going to keep doing this, but is a bit maddening. This is the sort of thing I mean when I say I spend a lot of my energy trying to outwit him.
To be clear--DS has been a neophobe around food pretty much from the instant we tried transitioning him from baby food to actual food. It's the main reason he merited EI services way back when. But I'm always casting around to see if there's something I might have missed that I could try. This kid, man. If there was an Olympic Stubbornness team, he could be stubborn for his country.
