My eldest is 3 1/2. I want her to like good food, but I think things are getting badly out of hand.
My wife was going out for dinner, so I thought a quick spot of pasta and some cold cuts and salad would do the job. The little one thought so too when I pointed to a picture of what I was going to cook. The water boiled and I got out the already open packet of pasta.
“Not bavette, Daddy! Fettucine.”
True, the picture is of fettucine al limone. Zest, juice, butter, pepper and grana padano on long pasta. But bavette is close enough, surely? Nuh. I open the packet of somewhat broader ribbons.
Anyway, it worked out nicely. The baby boy is eating it up. The toddler is hoovering the stuff. My wife has a little taste and likes it too - we’re discussing whether a little sage might add something when the toddler interrupts with a hand gesture:
She’s pretending to crank the handle of our pasta machine. “This would be better if we we rolled the pasta.”
My sister-in-law routinely bakes her own bread. Somedays she wonders if it’s really worth the effort, especially since no one will eat the heels of the bread, and my nieces are prone to not eating the crust either.
And then they went visiting Grandma and Grandpa who had perfectly ordinary store-bought bread. “Mommy, this isn’t as good as your bread”. OK, she’ll keep baking her own bread.
At home, we often have 750ml bottles of Perrier bought in bulk. My son has developed a taste for Perrier. One day when he was 3, we were shopping at Home Depot and had finished the bottle of Perrier we’d brought along, so I went over to the water fountain to refill it.
A little while later, he asked for a drink, and took a swig from the Perrier bottle. He gulped, made a face, and then asked, “What’s this?”
“It’s water.”
“It doesn’t taste right!”
“It’s fine.”
“This isn’t Perrier!”
“Well, OK, no, I refilled it at the water fountain. Just drink it!”
“No! I want Perrier!” (Throws tantrum)
Boy, the looks we got from the other customers… I tell you, I was more embarrassed then than I was the time he escaped from me while I was changing his diaper, and ran around a department store changing room looking for his mother while naked from the waist down. That was just funny.
