Charmed Life
One of my most enduring food memories from childhood—aside from the time my mother bought 20 hamburgers at Burger King during one of their 29-cent specials, froze them and served them reheated over the course of a month—is sitting at my family’s kitchen table, alone. By which I mean: alone with a bowl of spinach. The dishwasher was humming. From the other room I could hear the TV news. Everyone was gone except me. I was there because I hadn’t eaten my spinach. I was there until I ate the spinach.
I recalled that memory last night at my own dinner table, when I told my 2-year-old daughter, “Eat your spinach and a few more bites of fish, and you can have dessert.” She is so young. She is so easy to fool. She took a few bites of the spinach—which, granted, was baby spinach that I had lightly sauteed in sesame oil (not the awful, coarse, raw spinach my mother used to foist on us)—and the fish—which she and my 1-year-old son liked, though I thought it was bland and mushy (and my husband covered it with Tabasco). Then she said, “I did it!”
I happily cleared her plate and served her “dessert,” which was homemade apple sauce. Like I say, the child is easy to fool. She ate her spinach and she didn’t even get a true dessert for her troubles. No ice cream, no cupcakes—just fruit masquerading as something sweet with the help of a dash of cinnamon.
I know that a year or two from now, I’ll look back at a dinner like last night’s, and think, “Glory days.” By then, my daughter will be savvier. She will be a more cutthroat negotiator. She will want to bring in legal representation before she agrees on a deal to eat something green in exchange for something sweet. And I’m sure there will be a night when she, too, will sit in the kitchen long after all the dishes have been cleared, staring at her enemy, wondering how her mother can expect her to eat something so dreadful, thinking she’ll never do that to her own children. Ah, youth.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/09/11 at 10:27 AM
