The rules of brat-ola cuisine

I don’t care for fancy restaurants, but my wife Betsy loves them. An occasional night out, away from the kids, gives her the illusion that her life is a lot more pleasant than it really is, and I’m for that.

On one of those outings, as we dawdled over dessert, she gazed into my eyes and said, “Dear, it’s wonderful eating dinner with somebody who doesn’t throw food on the floor.”

“Shucks,” I said, glad to have one of my finer qualities recognized. But it would be small of me not to note that our food thrower, 18-month-old Baby Wendy, happens to be our best eater. Omnivorous means “eats all,” and she really does. It doesn’t even have to be food. Meat, potatoes, rice, beans, crayons (any color), and “green leafies” (including oak and maple) all find their way into her chubby face. Our older kids, Marie, age eight, and Sally, five, started out as excellent eaters like Wendy, but every couple of months something else falls off each girl’s dwindling menu of tolerated foods. It was a sad time when tomato sauce was renounced by Marie and Sally within two days of each other.

Now the older girls are each down to three entrees. Not the same three, of course, but they do have one selection in common—spaghetti with white cheese sauce (known in our home as “brat-ola sauce” in honor of those who demand it).

It could be that some of Marie’s self-imposed restrictions are the result of moral convictions. “I wish there was no Meat Group,” she told me one day after she’d had a nutrition lesson in school. “Then all the animals would be friendly, and you could snuggle with a tiger or a bear just like a stuffed animal.” But whatever the case, the animal kingdom can’t make much of a claim against either child since the tiny amounts of meat they eat wouldn’t require much more than minor surgery. And the girls are no threat at all to the vegetable kingdom.

Although both kids are picky, they differ in approach. Marie bargains hard to determine how little she can eat and still qualify for dessert. However, Sally figures that if she can discredit the food as being “sour” or “rotten,” then she won’t have to eat it. This infuriates my wife, who sees food as an expression of her love for her family. My attitude is that of a prison cook who is legally obligated to put dinner in front of hunger-striking inmates.

As finicky as my kids are, I’ve seen worse. My niece had to be sent to her room when, at her fourth birthday party, the hinge on her hot-dog roll broke and she became hysterical.

Last year, a six-year-old, visiting our house wouldn’t eat lunch. We had the right kind of bread (whole-wheat), but the wrong kind of peanut butter (chunky) and the wrong kind of jelly (grape). Her father, after taking inventory of our other provisions, knelt beside her chair and, putting forth a line of reasoning that would stand muster in any courtroom, tried to guide her into a selection: “...Okay, we’ve established that you like this kind of bread, and yesterday I saw you eating ham…” But his child, sensing where he was leading her, began shaking her head no without even waiting to hear his summation.

My unpersuasive friend had overlooked three principles of brat-ola cuisine:

1. A liking for bread and a liking for ham have no bearing whatsoever on ham sandwiches.

2. A liking for any particular kind of food is a fleeting and subjective thing and should not be inferred no matter how compelling the evidence.

3. The accidental eating of ham on one particular occasion can’t be taken as a promise to eat ham day after day until the end of time.

Basic logic is a crude tool for this kind of work. You might as well try to cut the crusts off a sandwich with a lawnmower.

On Wednesday evenings, my wife sneaks away to a paying job, so I make dinner—always spaghetti. The baby can be counted on to eat whatever she doesn’t fling across the room. And the two bigger girls will often choke some of it down after the brat-ola sauce has been applied. Last week, I’d exerted myself to keep them away from any appetite-spoiling snacks and had high hopes for the spaghetti.

As I sat down, something white caught my eye. “Why is there ice on your plate?” I asked Sally.

“I’m going to eat it!” she said, picking up one of the two cubes and biting at it with her savage little milk teeth.

This looked promising! Whether Sally was just experimenting or actually ADDING something to the list of the acceptable, either action violated a rule of picky eating. And if it could happen with ice, maybe it could happen with peas.

But, watching Sally scoot the melting cubes around on her plate and flick drops of water at her sisters, I wised up: She was either playing with her food or had brought toys to the table. In either case, she was unimpeachably in compliance with the brat-ola code. Silly me.