Feeding a picky eater

One might wonder what feeding a picky eater has to do with being thrifty. I mean, the poors will eat lentils and rice and like it, right?

No.

For a lot of us with new humans, it's not as simple as lentils and rice. And no matter how cheap the food you are cooking, it's not cheap at all if your shortstack won't eat a bite. Here are a few tips from a thrifty mama who went through The Cheese and Starch Years, and survived.

Prior to having a baby -- prior to even being pregnant with a baby -- I had very lofty plans about feeding him. He would eat along with his parents, enjoying everything from curry to sushi to mushrooms to Sriracha sauce. I would never be a short-order cook. I knew, with the clarity bestowed to the very stupid, that if he got hungry enough, he would eat what I fixed, or one of the healthy snacks I would always have on hand.

Oh, Karma is a mean, mean bitch. She even toyed with me a little: when Crash first ate solids, he loved carrots and sweet potatoes and green peas. I remember sitting at a restaurant when he was about a year old, and how he scooped up mushrooms from my veggie pizza.

Karma was hanging out with her mean girl friends, Payback and Hindsight, chuckling.

Somewhere in the six months after his first birthday, Crash decided he no longer ate green things, or orange things, or really anything. For the next four years his list of foods were bread, pasta, cheese, peanut butter, and some fruit. He didn't eat things he'd previously wolfed down. He didn't eat meat. He didn't eat vegetables. He didn't eat ketchup, much less marinara sauce.

I got lots of "helpful" "advice" during these years, and some actually helpful advice, and I figured some things out over time. Here's an overview of what worked and didn't work for me.

 If he gets hungry enough, he'll eat it. NO. Spoken by someone who has absolutely no clue how stubborn kids can be. Also, toddlers (and I) do not make good decisions when they get hangry (hungry + angry.) Also, even if one's child eventually gets hungry enough to eat the offensive item, you won't care anymore because your sanity will have long since disappeared in the face of the relentless goddamn whining. Also, you know who favored this parenting tactic? Joan Crawford.*drops mic*

He should eat X number of bites of X number of what's on his plate. NO. Oh, yes, let's take a stressful situation and throw some math into it. This is going to lead to hair-splitting over how many atoms of matter constitute a bite; whether that bite was so big it actually counted as TWO bites; whether bites have to be chewed; if bites can be consumed in shot fashion with a milk chaser; and in the case of many children I know, including my own, gagging and/or horking right there at the dinner table.

The only variation of this that ever worked with Crash was a bargain made in desperation: when trying a bite of something new, he was allowed to spit it into my hand if it was just as horrible as imagined. This did not garner a lot of dinner party invitations for us, but he was four and not in high demand on the entertaining circuit.

Present foods over and over; it can take a child up to ten times to accept something new. SORT OF YES. Ten times, a hundred times, who's counting? I began to think Crash was testing his data thoroughly, and making sure broccoli didn't kill me on the third try, or the thirtieth, or the three hundredth. Eventually he decided his data set was large enough, and tried broccoli.

Along with the above: present food in different ways. HELLS YEAH. When I was a picky little thorn in my own mother's side, we frequently had green beans, cooked Southern style (i.e., cooked so soft you could take your dentures out to eat them, with a greasy chunk of pork product.) It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I realized green beans were allowed to have texture and taste like anything but pig fat. Texture is a huge thing for kids, so if a kid doesn't like steamed broccoli, he might like it raw, or roasted, or in cheese sauce.

Which leads to: to a certain extent, try foods under cover. I am not a proponent of stuff like pureeing beets and hiding it in spaghetti sauce. I read a whole cookbook based on that theory, and my thoughts after reading dozens of recipes involving hiding squash puree in brownies and white been puree in pancakes were, a) this lady has an unhealthy involvement with her food processor; b) how much nutritional value is left in a small serving of vegetables that have been cooked, pureed, cooked again, and divided between 4-6 servings? and c) ain't no-freaking-body got time for that.

That said, some subterfuge is good. My undercover ideas involve cheese, bread, and ketchup/tomato sauce. The first broccoli Crash ate was diced finely and put in a cheese quesadilla. He then progressed to a grilled cheese with broccoli, and broccoli dipped in queso, and now to steamed broccoli with a little lemon butter.  He will now eat a number of veggies (okay, three - onions, mushrooms, and red bell peppers) in spaghetti sauce as long as they are diced fairly small. I think this is much less crazy-making for the cook; besides, what message does it send that vegetables are so heinous we're slipping them into dinner like Micky Finns.

Model eating a variety of foods. YES. Kids are awesome bullshit detectors, especially when it comes to what you do as opposed to what you say. So eat good stuff, in front of them. Yes, this may entail being somewhat of a short-order cook, and what of it? You get to eat delicious chicken tikka masala, kid eats tortellini, marinara, and some carrots and apple sticks. Everybody is fed and happy, and maybe the enticing smell of masala will coax your child to try a bite (that you keep offering, no pressure, and he can spit it out in Mom's hand.)  

Also, a variation of this modeling thing happens when your picky eater goes to school and begins eating with friends. And suddenly, He of No Red Sauce starts eating marinara because his friends at school eat it. Let peer pressure be your friend for once.

Cook with your kids. Yes, Yes, Yes, A Million Times Yes. I bought Mollie Katzen's Pretend Soup more or less in desperation, and I cannot praise her children's cookbooks enough. I believe it was from Pretend Soup that I got the broccoli in grilled cheese idea. She has 3 cookbooks: Salad People I think skews for toddlers; Pretend Soup for older toddlers to maybe 6 or 7; and Honest Pretzels from maybe a very together five-year-old and up. The recipes are done in picture form for kids, with a standard format for adults following. There are tons of safety tips. The recipes are decently healthy (octo-lacto vegetarian,) but not oppressively HEALTHY. We use all three cookbooks today, even through C. is twelve.


Now that I've gotten my embarrassing girl-boner for Mollie Katzen out of the way, you don't need to buy a cookbook or even check one out of the library. Cooking with your kids doesn't have to be some big frakking Martha Stewart deal with matching gingham aprons. Buy a box of mac and cheese and let your child cook it, with appropriate supervision. Buy a box of cake mix. Shit don't have to be fancy, and even a box of mac and cheese teaches important skills -- there is a reason there is/was a show for adults called How to Boil Water. 

Keep in mind these things: kids are messy and slow and ask a lot of questions. Don't anticipate that cooking with your child is going to be some perfect little moment you can Instagram. My very own child, now twelve, who knows so, so, SO much better, recently decided he would break an egg for me by throwing it up in the air and letting it SPLAT in the bowl which already contained flour and sugar and whatnot. I would like to say there weren't heated words as I picked eggshell out with tweezers, but there were. And that is okay, because THINGS WERE LEARNED. Like the far reaches of mom's vocabulary.

And my own piece of advice: fuck the haterz. And the busybodies, the know-it-alls, the mommier-than-thou, the well-meaning *cough* grandparents. Fuck your spouse if he or she has a lot of IDEAS about mealtime, without having a lot of actual real live help. Do the best you can, don't make yourself crazy, give the child a multivitamin, and pour Mommy and/or Daddy an adult beverage.

My last piece of advice, given the sometimes demoralizing one-upmanship between parents, if you encounter a parent who likes to humblebrag about how little Saffron eats everything, goodness, we can't keep kale in the house -- just breathe.

Breathe.

Breathe, and imagine how in fifteen years, Saffron will be sneaking out the bedroom window to meet a romantic partner, named Skull.

With a spiderweb tattoo.

On the face.

Breathe.