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Eat Your Spherified Vegetables!Trying out molecular gastronomy on my picky son.

By Sara DickermanUpdated Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2008, at 11:43 AM ET

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A homemade tomato sphere.When tasting time comes, the Critic cries as if I were feeding him brimstone. The tomato gel slides down his chin, but the broccoli doesn't even make it that far—I don't have the heart to make him taste it. His baby sister, 8 months old, is rather less horrified—she rolls a tomato sphere around in her mouth.

I give the spheres a try, too. Unlike my son, I think the tomato is quite yummy, although the gelatin is too fragile and bursts before I get it to my mouth. (For $200, I'd expect the Texturas kit to provide significantly more advice on troubleshooting.) With more experimentation, no doubt, I could form more perfect jellied marbles or the smaller spheres known as "caviar," but it's clear that spherification isn't helping my son get into vegetables.

I feel bad about terrorizing my son, but I decide to try one more gag. The kit includes a tin of Lecite or lecithin, an emulsifier, which Adria uses to create whisper-light "airs" of lemon juice, soy sauce, and vinegar. I recall a picture of Adria with a bowlful of carrot air from the cover of the New York Times Magazine, so I grab some carrot juice, acidify it with lemon, and add a touch of maple syrup for sweetness. (Hey, give the kid a break, yes?) After mixing in a few doses of Lecite, I whiz away at the surface of the liquid with my hand mixer and watch as bubbles erupt wildly from the surface. This is fun. After a few minutes, I scoop up all the bubbles and freeze the first batch of air. Then I invite the Critic to help me whip up a second. This time around, he thinks molecular gastronomy is a gas.

Homemade carrot airUpon tasting, the frozen variant helps me imagine what carrot-flavored frost might be like; the unfrozen version is like a mouthful of soap bubbles, but tasty. The Critic asks if he can put carrot bubbles in his next bath. "Mom, I really do like it," he tells me in his most earnest voice. I'm not sure how much I've expanded his palate—after all, carrots are the one vegetable that don't horrify the Critic. Nevertheless, I begin to feel that perhaps this silly experiment is worthwhile–it has sparked, ever so briefly, a sense of vegetal wonder. And then, after a few mouthfuls of carrot air, the Critic informs me that he's ready for a real dinner.

I can sympathize with my son. As much as I appreciate the theatrical aspects of my most extravagant restaurant meals—frozen beer foams and liquid-nitrogen poached meringues! I'm always grateful to return to "normal" food afterward, like a bowl of pasta. The Critic gets his real dinner, with plenty of fruit on the plate and a morsel of roasted eggplant—which he tosses onto the ground.