Eat your potatoes...

I don't think I am talking out of school by sharing the fact that I am the cook in my family.  My wife, beholden of an arsenal of amazing skills upon which we desperately rely to run our home, has never been the cook.

This is as opposed to me, who grew up the third son of two working parents who commuted from the metro Detroit area to the rolling countryside of Livingston county five days a week.  The easiest way for me to mitigate all of the trouble I got into as a kid was to be the family cook and have dinner under way for them by the time they got home.

Pretty hard to yell and scream too much about the broken window or C+ on that history test when the same culprit who wrought that mischief is also responsible for the beef stew and bread now warming you from head to toe, isn't it?  So, as it turned out, I learned to cook at an early age.

20 years and two kids later, I am still cooking but for a different family.  My own family. There is my wife, with her sophisticated and diverse pallet - she eats things that I would never consider.  Then there is me - if it didn't have parents, what's the sense of eating it?  Every meal in my mind needs a meat, a vegetable and some other thing (usually pasta, rice, or potatoes).  Simple, old fashioned, probably not on whatever list of healthy eating is in the back of the mompetition cookbook, but what the heck - these are my kids not yours ;-)

And then there are the children.

It would be cheaper for me to feed these children if I just opened the pantry to let them graze and then walked right out to the garage and threw a ten dollar bill into Captain Curby (our dumpster). 

When my son was a very little boy, he would go on these hunger strikes - weeks at a time without eating anything.  Usually, after a couple of weeks of no eating, I would prepare for him a platter spaghetti with meat sauce larger than anything a grown man would eat, and leave him in the kitchen.  He would replenish, like an Anaconda eating a gazelle, and then spend the next two weeks digesting.  And who am I to question him, really.  I always tease him that he got the six-pack abs and I got the keg - so what the heck do I know about eating anyway?

And the girl - the master of culinary disaster, the queen of no plate clean - she hasn't met the meal she won't waste entirely.  The only secret in getting her to eat is to just withhold all food from her until about 9:00 o'clock at night.  Then place a well balanced meal down in front of her and she'll eat almost anything on her plate.  But if I left it up to her, she would survive exclusively on chocolate milk, egg noodles, and black olives.

Two nights ago, dinner was chicken dinosaur nuggets (thank you Sams Club for this modern day equivalency of Mrs. Paul's fishsticks), egg noodles with a little chicken gravy mixed in, and fresh Brussels Sprouts.  In cleaning up after the meal, I was like an archaeologist unraveling the mysteries of an ancient civilization.  "Here, at the head of the table, sat the matriarch.  You can tell that because there isn't a morsel of wasted food (obviously she has a keen eye on the budget) and the lipstick on her beer bottle is still warm." 

"...And here, at the other end of the table, obviously sat the man.  You can tell that because the seat is molded to a perfect mirror image of his ample butt and there is a contraband empty bottle of Diet Pepsi next to his seat. His plate, too, is clean."

Now comes the tricky part - "...this seat here obviously belonged to someone with a serious Brussels Sprout addiction.  The remains of 25 - 30 fresh petit cabbage' are strewn around his eating place.  He is obviously fit as he did not touch his noodles and is a bit of a ketchup addict.  High fructose, water to drink, sprouts - this seat belongs to a growing boy with the energy level of your average Corvette.

And here, across from him, there might be a plate underneath this pile of toys somewhere.  Who knew they made so many PollyPockets?  But if you gingerly set them aside, you can find a plate and notice that it is absent any hint of noodles.  Either she didn't have any, or she has actually licked that part of the plate clean where her noodles were.  And marvel at how artful she was in this endeavor because the chicken dinosaurs and Brussels Sprouts have not been disturbed at all.  Observe there is a weird five-oval pattern repeating itself formed of some kind of dark juice."  Sniff....Sniff..."...it appears to be olive juice and the marks almost look like this girl had olives on the ends of every one of her fingers for the entire meal.  Without a doubt this is the baby of the family.  She must burn calories like an aircraft carrier burns uranium because the chair she sits in is about 4 inches from the table..."

Yep - that was two nights ago.  My kids' two plates at the end of that meal actually resembled the yin/yang image - the exact inverse of each other.  Michael left all of his noodles, consuming only sprouts and chicken, and Kristin ate only her noodles, leaving chicken and sprouts.

So the following night, my patience now very thin with the amount of wasted food, I made only two things.  Oven roasted Italian chicken (which was fantastic by the way) and au gratin potatoes.  They didn't know what to make of the potatoes before them, they were potatoes, but yellow in a delightful, magical sauce.  And there wasn't a single olive on the table.  The chicken they easily recognized.  Michael scarfed his down smothered in...Ketchup - of course.  Kristin, shoved hers around her plate without eating a bite.

After about a half hour of family time, the conversation turned to the actual meal before them.  As mine was happily digesting somewhere beneath my equator, I had plenty of time to focus on them.  The conversation went something like this:

Me:  "...eat your potatoes."

Michael: "I hate my potatoes."

Me, slowing down and enunciating every word individually: "Eat. Your. Potatoes."

Michael - acting like I told him to go streak at the mall: "DAD! I hate these potatoes."

Me quickly changing into my Dad: "I don't care what you hate, eat those potatoes."

Michael, quickly morphing into a modern version of a 10 year old me: "What?! You don't care if I die?"

Me, my impression of my father now in a full open-field sprint:  "Lookit, mister, you won't die unless you don't eat those potatoes..."

Kristin, my angel: "Dad, don't be mean to Michael."

Me - to Kristin, feeling that she is somehow less angelic than she was 30 seconds ago: "You eat your potatoes too."

Both of them, loudly and in unison as if this was a rehearsed skit: "We hate these potatoes!"

Me, staring at their mother who is now smiling and rolling her eyes at me: "This isn't a restaurant, no one cares what you hate. Eat them..."

Michael, making a face and gagging hard: "ugh, I might throw up."

Michael's mom, cooly sipping the last remnants of her Labatts : "Don't hit the potatoes...."

I was reminded of a nearly identical scene 40 years in my rearview mirror.  My dad made a huge meal of spaghetti, salad, bread, black olives and me and my brothers, each two years older than the other with me being the youngest, screwed around for our entire meal until the pasta and sauce on our plates was stone cold.  I couldn't eat it no matter what threats of violence Sergeant Rock hurled at me and, when the first full forkload of cold spaghetti hit my lips, I threw up everywhere.  I remember it well because I got smacked once and sent to my room without having to eat it.  :-) 

It will be a couple of years yet before Michael is allowed to access the computer with enough freedom to find these pages, so I can admit that I have been in his shoes.  The only way he was getting out of eating those potatoes was to actually play the barf card once he threatened it.  Oh sure, I got belted once, but I didn't have to eat cold spaghetti. 

So, wherever you are this night, I hope you have good (warm) food prepared for you by someone who loves you, fine spirits made glad by the company you keep, and the delights of being part of a family to keep you invigorated and feeling vital and making memories that will last a lifetime.

Thanks for stopping by my blog today!

Dennis
smalltowndad@hotmail.com