We turn from Frosted Flakes to asparagus
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- October 30, 2020
- 890
Hold the jokes, but sheltering in place earlier this year saw us making blanket forts to play video games, watching a lot of movies, ordering useless crap from Amazon, gobbling delivered snacks and drinking wine.
Also, there’s a baby due at our house in January.
Being pregnant has changed the cooking and eating landscape at our house entirely, mostly from regular meals to a steady stream of snacks, which we had better never run out of, let me tell you.
Now in the home stretch (pun intended) of what has been a rather challenging pregnancy, we aren’t cooking much at all because what Mom and baby want to eat changes by the moment.
We may plan a full chicken-based meal at 4 p.m., but that may very well change to grilled cheese or a bag of M&Ms by 4:20 p.m. How hungry we are for whatever we planned to make is in direct proportion to whether or not the ingredients have been purchased.
If the stuff is in the fridge, chances are we’re gonna ditch it and go get pizza, tossing the furry chicken two days later.
All kidding aside, I’m struck again by the brilliant plan by which all the misery of cooking up a new human falls to women. One look at the process and a glimpse of a living thing moving inside the body of another person, and it’s plain to see our species would die out in one sullen generation if this were up to men.
I am the happy father of two lovely grown daughters. This time it’s going to be a son, and that quite honestly has me both weepy with joy and jittery with night sweats. I’ve always been involved in creative fields, in the arts, in writing and pursuing new lines of study. What am I going to do with a magnificent son who looks at me eagerly with a baseball in his hand?
I’ll ask him flat out, “Where’s your mother?” That’s what I’ll do. “Go talk to someone who has thrown one. Come talk to me when you need to sort out the silverware.”
I want him to grow up to have a varied, experimental palate, but I don’t know how one can ensure that. Children are geared from birth toward sweet things to eat because those growing brains require enormous amounts of fuel and carbs are the easy way to deliver that.
At some point, we all turn from Frosted Flakes to asparagus, but there has to be some trick to getting youngsters to keep trying things along the way. I know full-grown adults who still live on chicken tenders and tater tots, refusing to try blue cheese, and that ain’t gonna be my kid.
I think I know the secret, actually. Food is the same as any other category when it comes to kids. If parents offer something up as a good thing, there’s at least an 80% chance of rejection simply because of the source. Parents don’t know squat about anything. So you need to find a mentor, some idolized adult who can stand in and broaden the horizons. My grandfather played that role, and I know my mother could have begged me to try oyster stew for all of my upbringing and I would have, of course, refused.
Clarence Mumaw made darn good oyster stew. He was a huge influence on me, and I ate everything he made with gusto including slices of garlic in salads, hot peppers and bleu cheese. Mom could not for the life of her understand any of it. To this day, I can’t gag down liver and onions. Grandpa didn’t make liver and onions.
You have to be sneaky. You can pretty quickly tell when a child is all goggle eyed over a hero uncle or family friend, and they must be pressed into service of the greater culinary good.
I hope the key is not feeding him interesting things in utero. If so, he’s going to want salt & vinegar chips, Starburst, bread & butter pickles, and string cheese, all of it with a side of cheese pizza. He’ll swig ginger ale by the case and munch bagels by the hour. I just hope he doesn’t get mommy’s resulting heartburn, acid reflux and insomnia, especially the insomnia.