MARY ANN FITZMORRIS

What’s on the menu? The children have threatened to report me to child services. My son thinks he has a convincing case for child neglect. In my own defense, I would have to say… well, I haven’t much to say. I’ve simply lost interest in feeding them. Instead of normal family mealtimes, I just go on about the day hoping they don’t notice their hunger. The question I fear most from my children is, “What’s for dinner?” I don’t even know why they ask this question. If it isn’t exactly what they had for lunch or for the previous night’s dinner, it’s just a slight variation. My daughter broached the subject about dusk last night. “Mom, what’s for dinner?” I thought about answering that question the way my mother often did, with a mysterious grin and the reply, “Something delicious!” That answer almost always meant it was not delicious at all. We would be forced to eat something like boiled cabbage and ham, which I was forced to re-taste every week for my entire youth. It was this memory of my regular date with that stinky vegetable which caused me to embark on the path we chose, which was to let the children make the choices of what they wanted to eat. I didn’t realize at the time the road we were traveling got narrower and narrower, ending with their eating nothing. Okay, almost nothing. They eat pasta and rice, cheese, red meat, peas, broccoli, corn and fruit. These are all good things to eat. And there are many variations and combinations possible. Until Mom actually dares to vary or combine. Take lasagna. It has three real favorites: red meat, cheese and pasta. But lasagna is out. The cheese is all wrong. Besides, it contains all that “sneaky” stuff which gives food more flavor. Unfortunately, onions and spices aren’t sneaky enough to disappear completely after imparting their essence. The detection of onions can sometimes single-handedly render a dish taboo. Which is why I no longer bother to cook. In the old days when I assembled some of the approved ingredients to make a meal, I wound up with leftovers for a week. When they declared red meat yummy, they only meant steak or hamburger; hamburger without “sneaky” stuff. Roast beef is only OK if it’s rib roast, not chuck roast. After eating a few roasts all by myself, I got the idea. Furthermore, all cheese is not created equal. Only Cheddar and the powerful Parmesan are acceptable, while milder mozzarella is intolerable. Unless it’s on a pizza. Go figure. These hard lessons have created in me such a lack of enthusiasm that my son no longer asks what’s for dinner. He just begs, “Please feed me!” And I do. When the barrel of cooked pasta in the refrigerator runs out, I boil another pound. To keep it interesting, we go from elbows to penne to rotini. For excitement, farfalle. When I need a real thrill, I sometimes slip in a pound of radiatore. Toss pasta in some melted butter with Parmesan, or heated Ragu, or Cheddar and cream with a dash of salt…VOILA! That’s amor! Or abor, depending on your age, I suppose. Fortunately, it hasn’t dawned on my daughter pasta cooked one day and reheated another day amounts to leftovers. Leftovers are absolutely out of the question. This leftover issue goes back to lentils, something kids like mine normally wouldn’t even know existed. But at one time I actually had my daughter eating lentils. This was great, I thought, so I began freezing small bags of healthy lentils for when she uttered her most frequently used words: “I’m hungry.” Something about seeing a frozen block of dinner hit the counter with a thud really traumatized her. Leftovers became verboten. My son is more easygoing. He knows the square meatballs in his Ragu are yesterday’s hamburgers, and he doesn’t care, probably because he’s so hungry! My daughter has resorted to crackers and butter, a delicious combination she discovered one day after rejecting $20-worth of restaurant food. This situation makes me want to throw up my hands and sniff a phrase made famous by Marie Antoinette. “Let them eat…cabbage!” MARY ANN FITZMORRIS writes this column every Saturday for L’Observateur.