Last week, I made ONE of the dinners I’d planned. It was a weird week, I guess, where we ate leftovers Monday, got takeout Tuesday, ate takeout leftovers Wednesday, and went out to dinner Friday.
Thursday, instead of making one of the pre-planned meals, I pulled some pork chops out of the freezer, baked them in my favorite easy sauce, and paired them with brown rice and some broccoli that was on the verge of going bad. Saturday, finally, I got it together enough to make sheet pan veggie shawarma… but it wasn’t as good as it was the first time. Maybe because I forgot to include a red bell pepper? (My husband kept saying, “Wasn’t there more to this last time?” He thought I’d chopped up a sweet potato in the original, which does sound good. Maybe I threw in a zucchini? Yes, according to photographic evidence I did indeed add a zucchini. DON’T SKIP THE ZUCCHINI NEXT TIME.) Sunday, I made tacos.
This week is going to be weird in a different way: one or more of us has evening activities every single night this week, so dinner is going to be challenging to execute. I think tonight I’m going to make the slow cooker BBQ pulled pork I didn’t make last week, and then… play it by ear the rest of the week. I can always make chicken tacos in the crockpot if I need to.
In startling food news, I bought two heads of cauliflower so that I could wash it all at once, use half for the shawarma, and the other half for snacking. I put a few tiny florets of (raw) cauliflower on Carla’s plate the other night and she exclaimed, “What IS this white broccoli? It’s so good!” and requested more. Then yesterday she was feeling snacky after dinner, so I suggested cauliflower, and she thought that was a great idea. This morning, I noticed that the ENTIRE BAG of cauliflower had been emptied. I’m not complaining! Snacking on cauliflower is preferable to snacking on Cheez Its, in my book.
P.S., Carla 100% has seen and tried cauliflower before, and knows what it is and what it’s called.
As you can perhaps intuit from the above, Carla is still quite a picky eater. I’ve (mostly) stopped fretting about it, but I do sometimes fret about it.
Currently, my frets center around a trip we have planned for later this year. We are going to Europe, which will be Carla’s first time overseas. We are all very excited. And I am also pre-anxious that she will simply not eat anything while we’re gone. Sure, she could probably survive on pastries and ice cream alone, but I don’t really want my child to develop scurvy. (How long does it take to develop scurvy or other signs of malnourishment?) My husband is convinced that we’ll be able to find steak frites everywhere, and I am hopeful that we can find salmon on many menus (and that we can persuade our servers to serve said salmon sans sauce). But I am concerned that even familiar things, like steak and salmon, will be just different enough that Carla will find them inedible.
My mother likes to tell a story about my own first time in Europe. I was eight, which is quite a bit younger than Carla will be during our trip, but I was also very picky. My mother said that I was eating so little that she finally gave in and took me to a McDonald’s. I can only imagine how intensely it pained her to do so. She was desperate to get some food into me, she said, and she knew I would eat a McDonald’s hamburger, and she figured McDonald’s hamburgers were the same all over the world.
Alas, the menu apparently referred to this particular delicacy as a beef burger and – as it was not a hamburger – I refused to eat it.
(Carla, who helped stir the ground beef as it was browning last night, said, “This smells like steak!” and I had to share the apparently shocking revelation that tacos and steak come from the same source.) (I do not think this was new information to her, any more than I think I ever believed a hamburger was made with anything besides beef.)
There is a happy ending to my story, at least. During our trip, I fell in love with two separate cuisines: in Paris, I learned how to love simple green salads (is salad a cuisine? probably not) and in London, I experienced a life-changing introduction to Indian food.
I have hope that Carla will fall in love with something beyond croissants… but I don’t have confidence.
