My kids are actually pretty good eaters. I steamed kale for the first time the other night. The babysitter, who eats with us on Tuesdays, was the only one who really raised her eyebrows. I didn’t know you were supposed to cut the spine out though. No wonder it took so long to cook. The kids figured out pretty quickly that the stem was indigestible and tough as rawhide, and only ate the leafy part. They were a little suspicious because when I had tried chard a few weeks ago I didn’t put enough water in the pan and I burned it. I still made the kids try it, though I might have ruined my chances of them ever eating it again. “What stinks?!” they asked, walking into the kitchen for dinner. The other night when I served kale my youngest put her head in her plate and smelled it, checking to make sure I hadn’t made the same mistake.
When the kids were little, still sitting in high chairs, I got them to eat vegetables by serving them first. My mother still thinks of it as dietary abuse, though I’d never eaten a brussel sprout until I was in college, so I can’t really trust her opinion. Our version of greens when I was a kid was an iceberg lettuce salad with dressing made from ketchup and mayonnaise. That’s about as healthy as a Snickers Bar, and probably as low fat. My kids, who were then trapped in their high chairs (sometimes I wish I still had that advantage), would smell something good cooking for dinner and were hungry enough that they would gobble down steamed broccoli, knowing I wouldn’t dish them up dinner until they finished their vegetable. They wore the same expression Hank does when I open his can of food. They didn’t drool quite as much as he does. Maybe it was mean. Maybe it was too controlling. But they ate it, and it didn’t seem to do them any lasting harm. Anyway, they still eat broccoli.
We eat a lot of ethnic food so the kids have had to learn to like spicy Indian and Mexican food. They also love Thai, Chinese and Japanese food, though the middle one doesn’t eat raw fish, and only orders cucumber rolls. The other two can run a sushi bill up so fast my husband and I have to think twice before saying yes to a Japanese restaurant for dinner. They don’t really consider Italian food ethnic since we eat pasta most nights, at least as a side, and anyway they are part Italian from my husband’s family. During our gluten free phase we ate more potatoes and rice because gluten free pasta doesn’t taste very good. Lately some nights all we eat is pasta because after my son read the book Eating Animals and became vegetarian, I’ve found it difficult to cook alternative sources of protein that everybody will eat. My yoga teacher told me to beware of becoming a starchetarian. But other than this latest challenge, the kids are not particularly picky eaters. Charlie on the other hand, is a different matter.
I came home from a weekend away and Charlie wasn’t finishing the food in her bowl. She still growled at Hank when he showed himself willing to polish it off for her, but after a few meals like this I started to worry. I checked her mouth, thinking she had a sore tooth, but her food is of the soft canned variety and shouldn’t have bothered her. Plus she managed to get down some crunchy treats without the pained expression she wore while masticating her dinner. She was also acting normally, streaking around the house after the cat, leaping onto beds, excited for her walks. She was even having regular poops so I knew she didn’t have some kind of blockage. I asked the kids if they noticed her not eating all of her food while I was away and they confirmed she had been sporadic. That next night at dinner I caught my youngest feeding Charlie forkfuls of salmon from her plate, and I realized what was going on. Why eat the same old boring canned food when she can have a variety of fresh home cooked food at whichever chair she decides to rest her paws during dinner? One is generally not picky if one is hungry.
The next day clinched it. My middle daughter yelled, “Mom! Charlie ate an entire bar of dark chocolate!” I didn’t even bother disputing this, as the cat isn’t interested in chocolate, and Hank would never dream of trespassing. Charlie had climbed from my daughter’s bed up onto her dresser (she’s very little for a corgi), and plucked a Lindt dark chocolate/orange bar out of a pile of hair bands. She must have carried her prize to the dog bed in my daughter’s room (which both dogs tend to ignore, prefering to sleep on the bed every night), and consumed it at her leisure. She had the house to herself as the kids were at school and I was out. The only evidence she left was a few scraps of foil. Later that evening middle daughter took her running and upon return, Charlie ran up the stairs, leaped onto my bed to say hello hello, and promptly vomited that chocolate bar all over my silk duvet cover and youngest daughter who had been watching tv. I’ve been feeding her less ever since and other than a small mishap with the compost bag today, she is back on her diet of dog food. While she doesn’t drool with anticipation so badly that I have to put her outside like Hank while I dish up, or the floor turns into a swimming pool, she has resigned herself to her fate and does in fact now finish what’s in her bowl.
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