Yeah, none of my friends have ever said they forced their kids to eat when the kid claimed to be full. Certainly, we never did that. That sounds cruel. Also, kids should learn to understand when they are hungry and when they aren’t.
We loved it, called it “chipped beef gravy.” How do you eat it?
- white bread, untoasted
- white bread, toasted
- other bread
- toasted, not toasted…doesn’t matter
- bacon
- other
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I had creamed chipped beef at a family camp my family went to. Still do, actually – one day a year. I love it.
Perhaps dark chocolate is “un-childlike.” I’ve always liked it. Specifically, I liked the Hershey’s Special dark chocolates that came in the package of miniatures. I did think it was special and fancy!
Lobster with drawn butter, T-bone steak on a platter, and Filet Mignon with whipped potatoes and buttered asparagus. 
Plus Welsh rarebit and deep-fried battered clams from Howard Johnson’s! 
I always used logic with my kids and they went along with it. “How can you know you don’t like this if you haven’t tried it?” Then they’d try it, and 90% of the time they were surprised it was good.
I was talking with a friend who learned that some foods he just wasn’t old enough to like, yet. In his fifties, he still tries foods he doesn’t like every few years in case he’s not old enough to like them. And he has picked up a couple new foods that way as an adult.
Smart friend. I hated Brussels sprouts as a kid but that was just because the only kind I had tried were frozen ones that had the bejeesus boiled out of them. Brussels sprouts are delicious, and thanks to the ex for my reintroduction.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve liked all of the cabbage-varietal vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, kale, etc.). Yes, even though Brussels sprouts supposedly used to actually taste bad: I liked them then, and still like them now.
It helps that my mom loves vegetables, too, and knows how to cook them properly (i.e., not overcooked).
I’m reminded of a time I got dragged to a dinner party at my parents’ friends’ house. The host, who had grown up in Louisiana, prepared Cajun red beans and rice for the grownups, and some other more “childlike” food for the kid’s table. I think I was going through a more adventurous eating phase at the time; I asked to try the red beans and rice, liked it, and requested that instead of whatever the kid’s food was. I remember liking it.
Also grew up in the “eat what’s set before you” era and my mom’s a very good cook so we had all kinds of interesting stuff. I have wonderful childhood memories of mom finding those tiny loin lamb chops on sale and sliding huge broiler pans full of them into the oven to sizzle up and we’d eat until we were on the floor. Love lamb to this day, whole family does.
Then we moved to Japan and I learned about all kinds of weird food like octopus on a stick grilled over a hibachi–late '60s Japanese fast food lol. I ate all sorts of interesting dishes and had no idea what was in them since I didn’t read Japanese, the menus had no English and I’d just point to whatever wax representation of a dish looked good in the display window out front. Found out later I’d been eating chitlins and raw fish and who knows what else–I sure didn’t but I knew what tasted good! I still crave shrimp chips on the regular and plenty of other Japanese snack foods and do a lot of my grocery shopping at Asian markets.
I had an uneasy relationship with a lot of vegetables though due to the fashion of frozen brick veggies–uniformly nasty, really. Had to relearn about how good things are when cooked from fresh and nowadays about the only vegetable I still won’t eat is peas, can’t stand those devil’s testicles.
I raised my kids to eat the way I do–they were both breastfed until they showed interest in people food and one kid’s first meal was chili and the other had spaghetti and I did not dumb it down just because they were under a year old. They both grew up liking basically everything and being very fond of spicy foods, not a picky eater in the family until you get to my younger grandson who I suspect is a supertaster with texture issues. He’s picky AF but we’re working on it. I really have a problem with kids being treated like special royals who dictate what they will and won’t eat, that’s kinda bullshit to me.
Gawd, me, too.
Lobster, shrimp, mushrooms, cauliflower, and my favorite: breaded oysters. My mom used to get a jar of oysters and bread them up every now and then, but always on a Tuesday night. That was the night of my dad’s Masons meeting, and since he couldn’t stand being in the same house as oysters (couldn’t even deal with the smell), Tuesdays were oyster night!