[Think Of A Something Thursday!]

I know I hate some foods just by looking at them. Lobster. Squid. Crab. Desert-rat that I was, those foods just look squishy and scary to me. They don’t bother me only during the day: they’ll give me nightmares at night. When I go to lunch with some of my coworkers, I’ll choose a “bad” seat at the table just so I won’t see or be near the slimy tank-creature-ambiance. I know it’s not rational, but snakes alive, I don’t want to look at them or have them lurking behind glass too close behind me.

This also precludes me from eating them as food. There are other foods I won’t eat, based on smell or texture, but I do try. Some foods are “bad” only when raw, so I just hold my nose and try not to breathe in scent until they are cooked enough.

Of course, if I have irrational reasons not to eat some foods, why shouldn’t my kids? But I know enough (and have the experience) to find a good alternative that will keep me going. A plate of yucky looking food is more likely to elicit a request for a jelly sandwich or cookies (my children are optimists, it seems, but settle for treats like strawberries, apples, and cheese just as readily). Or the negotiation attempts will begin as the eldest tries to find out the minimum number of bites that must be taken before milk or dessert is brought out.

Bentos: The LunchMaker

Living near MouseWorld, it’s a given that most non-chain restaurants will have the Mouser’s profile in pancake as the kid’s pancake option. You can also get dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets and fish-shaped fries. On a grand commercial scale, kid’s foods have come a long way from building ants on a log at summer camp and mom cooking up pancakes in the shapes of numbers or letters for our birthday.

These fun shaped foods usually come at a premium. And the content can be questionable - after all, chickens don’t really have a nugget flank, so there is a lot that goes into making and shaping said dinosaurs, breading them, frying them, and preserving them for all time. Or at least a few months.The fun shaped foods serve a second purpose, too. Sometimes you’ve got to get the kid to eat, and when they are stuck in irrational mode, it can be hard to break them out of it in one go.

So I started researching bento-style cooking, both as a way to get my kids to eat and a way to get the kids involved in the process of creating and then eating. So far, so good. A few cookie cutters (that don’t get enough use anyway), dust off the old chopsticks, and a few minutes extra work or different work makes a word of difference in eating for the kids. Good practice for their split next year into different schools where food is not always provided (or not preferred for one reason or another).

And some things are easy to do even on the fly. As evidenced by an impromptu dinner-hour trip to SuperTarget, it is possible to get my occasionally picky eater to consume an all beef hot dog, after a few targeted cuts with a plastic knife (since I don’t carry an octodogger all the time), whipping up of a fresh dinner-marketing campaign and story line, paired with strategic placement of said aliens on their space ship bun. So when we get invaded by six inch high tentacled aliens, we’ll be ready to repel the attack - and have a nice snack after*.

*wow, xenophobic and barbaric. I so rock as a parent. ;)