A young father tells me his 7-year-old daughter is a very picky eater. And there is evidence. He offers her several choices on New Year’s Eve, including macaroni salad, and she hollers a resounding no! to all of them from her bedroom. Tugboat, our cat, is a picky eater too. It can be the exact same flavor from the exact same company, but if it’s in paté form, the prince won’t touch it. He wants shreds.
I’ve seen parents having to trim away the crusts of bread. (When I make a sandwich for this kid, he gets to remove the crusts himself.) They can’t pour spaghetti sauce directly over pasta. They have to pulverize broccoli and peas and sneak them into meatballs.
It’s still a foreign thing when I hear parents ask their kids what they want to eat. My mother never asked us. I never asked my three kids either, not before I prepared their meals. I don’t remember getting any formal instruction on family dinner etiquette, but I knew not to ask my mom for a second bowl of rice if we had guests. I knew not to take the last piece of food because I believed it belonged to my mother, who would decide who got it by placing it into one of our bowls with her chopsticks. A luxe treat was tossing my rice into the pan to soak up the juices from a small steak she had cooked solely for her husband. The bits of fried garlic in the steak drippings coated the white rice and made it taste like heaven — sufficient proof that I could tell my friends the next day I had steak for dinner.
Another foreign thing: potlucks. People really just bring a dish to share. Essentially, I’m invited to a meal where the odds are high that no two foods go together. Beef chili and tuna casserole — with watermelon salad. My goodness, where did you find watermelon in late December? I walk along the table half trying to be polite and half trying to decipher this mess of a smorgasbord. Ah yes, of course, deviled eggs.
It’s not just that the food doesn’t get along and most of it isn’t at the temperature it’s supposed to be — it’s that I have to work before going to a party. Why would you invite people to a celebratory occasion and make them suffer at the same time?
Even with themed potlucks, like when I have to stare at a taco bar sign-up sheet in the teachers’ lounge, the whole thing is just inefficient and wasteful. We’re potentially asking 40 different staff members to get in their car, drive to the store, find parking, search the aisles for the item they signed up for. Soft corn or flour? Hard shells? Ooh, these shells stand up! Then they do mental math to know how much to buy, stand in line, drive home, and maybe forget the stuff in the car. Then we all witness what happens after the gathering — leftovers. A lot of food that people have touched, poked, or held up to the light. “Did you want to take these cool stand-up shells home?” I’m thinking, what the fuck for, but I say, “Yes, of course. Thank you.”
Happy New Year, everyone.
I made the most cumbersome thing to date: bánh bèo. (I’d have to drive over 100 miles one way to order these at a restaurant in Santa Ana.) They are steamed rice cakes topped with pulverized dried shrimp, mung bean, and scallion oil. It really was delicious — one of my favorite Vietnamese appetizers.
