food frets

by

Grocery Shopping with the Kiddo

I really, sincerely appreciated everyone’s thoughtful comments in response to my latest Food Fret. My big takeaway was that I should shut up about food, model the type of eating habits I want Carla to emulate, and try not to worry too much. This is usually the approach I take, and I think it is probably the smartest. That doesn’t mean it isn’t HARD, though. Food and eating are SO FRAUGHT. 

One of the Big Tips you hear repeatedly when you are looking for information about helping your child eat more/better is to take them shopping with you. This is a practice I have been employing for years – and if Carla expresses an interest in trying a food, I am happy to procure it for her. 

(There was the time when she wanted to try a clam, though, and I did end up drawing the line there. For one thing, I have no idea how to cook a clam so that it is remotely edible. For another, I personally do not find clams in any form to be edible. But the clincher was when, through gentle questioning, it turned out that Carla had confused “clam” with “oyster” and her real interest in getting a clam was to see if it had a pearl inside it. I am not researching “how to cook a clam” just so my child can see that it does not produce pearls.)

(I love her, she is so darling.) 

Yesterday, I dragged Carla with me to the grocery store. It was after camp, so she was hungry, and she was very interested in buying food. I said yes to everything she asked for (except ice cream because we are already eating ice cream approximately eight million times a week and we do not need another pint of ice cream in our freezer) and I have washed all the fruit and made sure that everything is on a Carla Eye Level shelf for easy access, and now will anxiously wait to see how much of this bounty she eats. 

I thought you might want to see what she chose. She bagged all of her own groceries, which made it pretty easy to photograph. 

I did not organize the items in a way that makes it easy to see what is what, but I trust you can figure it out. 

  1. Extra Sharp Cheddar Cheese: We already had an unopened block of cheese in the fridge, but in my opinion you can never have too much cheese. And cheese has protein and calcium so I am Pro Cheese.
  2. Demi Baguette: Carla ate half of this baguette in the car and the other half for dinner. 
  3. Chobani Flip Cookie Dough Yogurt: Do these have more sugar than I would prefer? Yes. But they are still yogurt, so I let her eat as many as she wants.
  4. Watermelon: I hate watermelon, and I hate preparing a watermelon, and then having pounds of watermelon on hand, so I am happy to pay a convenience fee to buy the super expensive pre-sliced stuff so I don’t have to deal with it. The thing is, I don’t think Carla really likes watermelon either? I think she kind of likes the idea of watermelon. We’ll see if she eats this. 
  5. Fully Cooked Bacon: She ate four slices of this for breakfast this morning, alongside a yogurt. I am choosing to see it as PROTEIN.
  6. Black Seedless Table Grapes: These grapes are teeny tiny, and Carla has – for unknown reasons – been looking for them for AGES. So when we saw them at the store, she immediately requested a carton. When we got home, she said she wanted to eat them the way the Romans did, and then requested that I feed them to her. No thank you, dear. 
  7. Crepes: We had a brief conversation about what she might put IN the crepes, and she said fruit (so I also bought some strawberries, not pictured), so I said why not. This seems like something we may end up not eating, just because they seem kind of labor intensive.
  8. Golden Berries: She grabbed these on a whim, and so far I’m the only one of us who has tried them. They have the texture of a grape tomato but a pleasantly sweet-sour flavor.
  9. Raw Slivered Almonds: This was another impulse buy. As far as impulse buys go, I feel okay about it.
  10. Wax Beans: These are Carla’s favorite kind of string beans. I think they are a decent source of fiber and I am happy with any vegetable she wants to eat.
  11. Ham: Usually the only ham Carla will eat is inside a Lunchable, and I have declined to buy Lunchables anymore except on very rare occasions. But Carla went up to the deli counter herself and asked for the ham and then she ate some for dinner last night. 
  12. Protein+ Spaghetti Noodles: This is Carla’s favorite noodle. She will eat a bowl of spaghetti with some meatballs on the side.
  13. Wholly Guacamole: While Carla eats way more chips than she does guacamole, I am happy to encourage her to eat guacamole. It’s got to be a gateway to avocados, right? (This was on sale, buy one get one free, which is a STEAL for these little packs.)
  14. Cookie: This was another impulse buy. It was at the checkout station and looked delicious, so why not. Carla took a bite, discovered it contained walnuts, and declined to eat any more of it. What a disappointment! 

There were a few things I forgot to photograph!

  • Frozen Meatballs: These were on sale, so I bought two packages. I do not eat ball-shaped foods, but I have no problem with other people doing so. 
  • Parmesan: Apparently Carla will put the powdered parmesan cheese on her pasta at school, so we bought some so she can do so at home. (Typically, she eats pasta with nothing on it. No olive oil, no butter. She won’t even let me salt the water.)
  • Artichoke: The other night, we got takeout for dinner and my meal included a roasted artichoke. Carla TRIED THE ARTICHOKE, pronounced it “not bad” and then requested an artichoke at the grocery store. The jury is out on whether she will eat any of it, but I am hopeful! 
by

Three Things Thursday

I am wearing my hair curly today. I kind of hate it??? “Well, just don’t wear your hair curly, Suzanne,” you might be saying briskly, with a tiny bemused head tilt and mild furrow of your brow. And sure, that SOUNDS simple, but a) my hair is naturally wavy/curly, so it requires blowdrying to jar it out of its natural state, which is not ideal ever but especially awful during the sweatslick of summer, and b) my Instagram feed is full of people who look amazing with curly hair and one of my closest friends sometimes wears her hair curly and it is fabulous, so it should be possible for me to wear my hair curly without hating it. So far, it is not possible. I got a gift card from Ulta for some holiday or other and used it to buy a bunch of sample sizes of curl enhancing products. While they do seem to enhance the curl, they do not enhance my appearance. I don’t know what it is. Maybe I just don’t have the face for curly hair? I feel like the curls exacerbate the roundness of my face. And somehow my hair has less volume when curly? Also, it’s very unevenly curly, with tighter coils around the left side of my face and looser/more jagged waves around the back. I don’t know. Perhaps I should have spent the 2020 lockdown pursuing the Curly Girl Method or otherwise figuring out how to like my hair this way. But I did not and so I am going around hating it until it’s time to wash my hair and start fresh. 

Nutrition, always a tricky subject, feels like it’s at an all-time low in our house right now. Carla makes her own lunch for camp, and I have to say that I honestly have no idea what’s in it. She wasn’t eating the well-rounded and nutrient dense lunches I packed for her anyway, and at least now I don’t have the double whammy of packing a lunch (ugh) and then seeing it return home after being unrefrigerated all day and having to dump it in the disposal (double ugh). I think sometimes she packs pickles and pepperoni and I close my eyes and concentrate on the fact that one is a vegetable and the other contains some protein.

The way we live our lives is not conducive to a lot of methods that most people seem to use to enforce proper nutrition. (We don’t eat as a family regularly, so I end up making separate meals for Carla which makes life easier in a lot of ways but doesn’t leave a lot of room for modeling the type of eating I want to promote.) But between the possibly garbage lunches Carla is eating and the presence of way too many sweets in her life (she uses her allowance to buy candy and chips at camp and at the library after camp), I feel a little fretful about the future. She’s eleven now, which means that puberty is around the corner, and I think this is a time in her life when she really needs to focusing on eating nutrient dense foods, both for all the growing she is about to do and for establishing good habits as she gets older and takes on increasing responsibility for her own food choices. 

But I don’t know what to DO. Hire a nutritionist is a possibility, I suppose, and Stephany’s experience has been positive enough that this has potential. But I am wary of the expense and worried about how hard it will be to find a nutritionist whose philosophies about body size and food morality jive with my own. (Also – and this is silly but it IS coloring my thoughts about nutritionists – a friend of mine hired a family nutritionist and her main suggestion seemed to be about making all sorts of “balls” with protein powder and dates and stuff, and I just cannot get behind a ball-centric food solution. This may sound 100% bonkers, but it is nonetheless true: I do not like foods shaped into balls, and I am not going to eat them.) (Cake pops: no. Meatballs: hard pass. Falafel: no thanks. Protein balls: no way.) I have tried making and eating multiple ball-foods, and I can say with confidence they are a no from me dawg. Beyond hiring a nutritionist, what to do? Oh, and I guess I should say that my word alone holds no water with my child. (For proof: We talked to a health professional, who by the way was not being consulted about food/nutrition and who has no expertise in food/nutrition, who told Carla humans should not drink milk outside of infancy, and she instantly grabbed onto this statement as The One Irrefutable Truth despite all the dozens of very reasonable, science-backed arguments my husband and I made to the contrary.) (And listen: I can, in some ways, understand that argument! I can! People can and do live their whole lives without milk! And yet, “you shouldn’t drink milk” is not a good suggestion to make to A CHILD whose parents struggle to get her to take in enough protein or calcium when milk is a perfectly good, legitimate source of both of those things. Also! I do not force my child to drink milk! I simply put it in smoothies, on the rare occasions she allows me to coax her to drink one!)  

Most of that previous paragraph was a parenthetical, and honestly sounds a little crazycakes, so I am going to start fresh. So, options: 1. Nutritionist. 2. Books??? I listened to a pretty decent book called The XX Brain by Dr Lisa Mosconi recently. It’s about how the female brain ages and steps we can take to nourish and protect our brains against cognitive decline. A large portion of the book is devoted to the importance of nutrition, and I found it pretty persuasive. However, the book is not something that would resonate with Carla. Maybe I could try Mosconi’s previous book, Brain Food? Carla and I could possibly listen to it together in the car. It would be better, of course, if there were books about the importance of nutrition that were targeted to her age group. This book seems to have a lot of information, and might be easy to pick up and leaf through… but even in the online sample, it struck me as having an anti-fat bias. A book about intuitive eating but geared toward teens might have potential… This one sounds like it offers a good mix of practical tips and evidence based suggestions, although I would want to read the chapters about “healthy weight” before I shared it with Carla.

Option 3. Podcasts??? Are there nutrition podcasts that would be appropriate for tweens? I almost never listen to podcasts, so I have no idea where to even BEGIN, and when I google there are ten million options which is overwhelming. Ideally, I would want a podcast I could listen to WITH Carla. Like I said, she’s much more likely to take advice from someone who is not me. Plus, I would really love advice about nutrition for kids her age or older. My experience with a lot of “kid-based” nutrition resources (like Instagram) is that they are directed at parents of very young children. I love the Kids Eat in Color account and have gleaned some good ideas from it, but I feel like I should have started following it ten years ago. Not a whole lot of it is applicable to an eleven-year-old, you know? As long as I’m making a podcast wishlist, I also want one that isn’t focused on weight gain/loss or being fat. There are plenty of OTHER valid reasons to eat a well-balanced diet, and that’s the message I want to get across to Carla at this very vulnerable stage in her life.

I want someone to tell me what to DO. Someone who understands that it’s not as simple as “just don’t have those things in the house,” because I don’t want to make “those foods” more tantalizing by being forbidden, and because I do think eating is MORE than just nourishing our bodies. Someone who gets kids who are picky. Someone who knows what to do when a kid is fine just not eating if the food on offer is unpalatable to her. Someone who believes in health at every size and who isn’t going to suggest cutting out an entire macronutrient. Someone who has better arguments against candy and chips than “they will make you fat.” Someone who also believes that candy and chips do have a role – if a far, far less frequent one – in a well-rounded diet.

I want to be clear that things aren’t DIRE, or anything. I think Carla eats a decent mix of fruits and veggies and fats and proteins and carbs. Her doctor has never expressed concern with how she is growing. I just wish I could get her to eat a wider variety of things, and that she would be open to eating a wider variety more often, and that I could get her to be less reliant on/interested in snack/junk foods. I just feel like we’re at an inflection point and I want to help her figure out how to eat in a way that is both nourishing and satisfying. Probably I will just keep flailing along as best I can, punctuated by moments of throwing my hands in the air with the impossibility of it all.

Yesterday, I forgot my address. I am putting this in print both because it was hideously embarrassing to the point that I keep going over it and over it in my mind, and committing things to print often allows my brain to stop dwelling on them; and because I want to have a record of it just in case this is the beginning of a steep slide into dementia. This happened during my writing group session. One of the members asked for my address and I could not remember it. At all. I mean, I knew the street name, at least. But I could not think of the street number. Our other member had to look it up in her phone for me. It was so awful! How do you forget your own address?!?!?! Is this a perimenopause thing? Is this a side effect of my ongoing lack of solid sleep? Is there something else at play? Or is it just a memory blip on the wide spectrum of “normal”? I don’t know, but it was alarming. 

What are you thinking about today? Have you ever had such an upsetting memory lapse?

by

Dinners This Week, Dinner Party Fret

After a very indulgent week of birthdays and holidays and houseguests, I am ready to scale back to the simplest type of meal, which for me means a week of Protein + Veggie dinners. Tonight, I think, we will be dining on Chicken + Broccoli because that’s what I have in the fridge. 

However, I have also briefly lost my mind and planned not one but TWO dinner parties for consecutive weekends. This always sounds so fun in the abstract. I am feeling more settled in our house and it truly is a great space for entertaining – our back yard is especially entertaining-friendly, when the weather is pleasant. We have friends and family visiting from out of town and it feels right and good to invite them over for dinner. I want to do this. I am looking forward to ti. And yet, when I get down to the nitty gritty of Hosting People for Dinner, I fall right back into the old conundrum of WHAT IN THE WIDE WILD WORLD DO I FEED PEOPLE? 

You know I like to cook! To the extent that any human can enjoy planning meals day after day after day, I enjoy it. I am not, however, a particularly good cook. My husband is the type of person who will eat almost anything, so I have no real gauge of whether anything I make appeals beyond my particular picky palate. 

When it comes to hosting people, I want something that I can prepare – almost totally – in advance. I do not like people helping me in the kitchen, and making sure everything is nearly done before they arrive makes this a non-issue. I want something fairly foolproof, since our guests are not regulars at our dinner table; I don’t mind, so much, experimenting on my parents or even my in-laws because I know they will come back, and they also have prior experiences against which to weigh this one. But the dinner guests we’re hosting over the next couple of weeks are NOT regulars; in fact, this is not only everyone’s first time at my house, but their first time eating anything I’ve made, ever. 

The things that come to mind are simple, everyone-likes-them meals like tacos or burgers. And yet I feel like those are TOO SIMPLE?! We have been to dinner at one of these people’s houses before, and they made us grilled steaks, which seems MUCH fancier to me than tacos. It feels like we should respond in kind??? This is so dumb. 

I feel like the most obvious answer is GRILL SOME MEAT, but our grill is… special. And by special I mean: it cooks everything unevenly, probably due to the fact that the burners light only in the back half of the grill, and sometimes one of the burners won’t light at all, but if even a tiny drop of oil slides off into the flame the resulting flare turns everything in proximity to charcoal. I have been over every inch of this grill, inside and out, and without buying ALL NEW PARTS, I think we are stuck with This Is the Way It Is, and “the way it is” seems to be “highly mediocre slash inedibly charred.” Oh, also, this weekend I opened the grill to turn it on and THERE WAS A MOUSE ON IT, so I think it may be a while before I feel like I have properly sanitized it for food-cooking purposes again. 

Sometimes I turn to salads. In fact, I’ve been turning to salads a lot lately, to the point that my husband is growing weary of our repertoire. 

I don’t want to use our oven, because I will melt. But I am WILLING to use it. Not that I have mastered the way our oven cooks things yet, either. 

These are not the kind of people where “let’s order takeout” would be appropriate; I certainly have friends who would be fine with that, but I think these guests might be a little miffed if I didn’t cook. Hmmm. Maybe I could order some catering and pretend I cooked it???? That feels wildly dishonest but in a possibly-doable way?

You would think that, after a good decade of having people over for dinner and stressing about it in advance, I would have a little stockpile of things I feel comfortable cooking for company. And yet, I don’t even have ONE THING. When I think back on past dinner parties, I see only things that didn’t turn out, or things that don’t seem appropriate for this time of year (chili) or these specific people (tacos). 

This is a question I have asked you many times over the years – and I should probably just go back and read some of those posts, instead of writing the same whine yet again and asking for the exact same advice I’ve never taken before – but what do YOU want to eat when you go to someone’s house? What is YOUR go-to Meal For Company? 

My biggest food fear when going to someone’s house is probably a casserole of some sort. I dislike casseroles, as a rule; too many things mushed together, too squishy. Plus, casseroles often seem to contain tomatoes, which is a food I cannot bear to eat, even out of politeness. So I think my preference when I go TO someone’s house is several discrete things, so I can take what appeals without (hopefully!) hurting anyone’s feelings. Like a protein and a side dish and a salad. So that’s what I like to serve, hoping that everyone will at least find SOMETHING edible. But I also want it to be GOOD, something I like, something the company likes. Argh. 

Should I make tacos? I should probably just make tacos. But maybe I will make balsamic pork instead? It’s easy; I can make it in the crockpot, and most everything else can be made ahead of time. We top it with a variety of toppings (caramelized onions, kalamata olives, feta cheese), which makes it fun. I can serve it with pita and hummus, which most people like. Hmm. Maybe this is a good choice for one of the dinner parties. But what do I for the other one?!?!?