Trying new foods

In Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban (one of my very favorite children's picture books), Frances decides that she only wants to eat bread and jam, so that is what her mother gives her. Eventually, Frances tires of bread and jam and starts to cry when everyone else at the table has spaghetti and meatballs. Her parents ask her why she is crying because they had given her what she had said she wanted, bread and jam. At the point Frances asks them, "How do you know what I'll like if you don't even try me?"

Now everyone knows that the trying of new food is not always so simple with children, but sometimes it really does work. Take tonight for example, which is the reason why this phrase has popped into my head. When I was planning the meals earlier in the week, I was feeling very tired of our usual meals. (I tire extremely easily of the same food evidently because we rarely have the same meal in the same month.) When this happens, I will flip through some cookbooks I haven't opened in a while, which is how I found myself flipping through Best Mexican Recipes from America's Test Kitchen. (You'll remember this is the book I purchased when we visited The National Museum of Mexican Art on one of our Not Back to School field trips.) I decided to make a tostada dish that used roasted corn and tomatoes with a baked egg on top. It sounded very good. It sounded different than our usual fare. It went on the menu.

It is not unusual for children to ask throughout the day what is for dinner. Sometimes they'll even look on the menu. Several times today children looked at the menu and saw tostadas, which excited them. Then they looked more carefully and realized these were not the tostadas they were used to and quickly became disappointed. While the adults were looking forward to dinner, the under 21 crowd was not. I've mentioned before that, for the most part, I plan meals me and J. If people like them, great, if not, they can eat the parts they like or go get a piece of fruit. (I do try to have something on the menu that will appeal to most people... tonight that was guacamole and chips.) Well, dinner turned out to be so good that everyone ate it. I'm sure the homemade tostada shells helped, but it was very good. 

One quick note about picky eaters. In general, we have tried very hard to cultivate a family value of adventurousness when it comes to food. We eat a very wide variety of foods and have since people were very small. Does everyone like everything? Nope, not at all. You can definitely not like some things, but what you are not allowed to do is say that dinner is/looks/smells disgusting or some variation of that. We point out that other people at the table are enjoying it and you may not dull their enjoyment with your words. You may say you don't care for something or politely ignore it. We will ask you try a small bite, though even that is negotiable if it is too hard for someone. Usually people are game to try a very small bite. And then there are usually at least a couple of people who are more than happy to take the offending food and enjoy it themselves. Tonight I only saw some baked squash (also from the same cookbook, it had a lime juice, honey, and chipotle chile sauce on it) and an egg yolk being rescued and eaten. Not much food goes to waste around here.