Tag Archives: food

Into each life some shrimp must fall, but too much is falling in mine

My son’s favorite food is shrimp tempura. But he only likes the shrimp tempura sushi rolls from one particular restaurant. He eats shrimp only at this restaurant, and he eats nothing but shrimp at this restaurant. Consequently, when he was about three, he renamed this restaurant Shrimp, as in “Let’s go to Shrimp for dinner tonight.”

I, being incorrigibly out of touch with what’s current and trendy in the world, don’t care for sushi. Fortunately, Shrimp makes a pretty good bowl of chicken teriyaki, allowing me to associate with the in crowd at dinner time. My wallet helps in this regard as well.

My son asks to go to Shrimp constantly. I can only eat so much teriyaki. Besides that, he can pack away three shrimp tempura rolls by himself. Then, my wife has to have her sushi, and I my hanger’s-on dish. It gets kind of pricey. We can’t afford to eat there every week.

Enough shrimp to feed a kindergartner

Did somebody order the child-sized shrimp basket ? (Image: John Ferrell/U.S. Farm Security Administration)

Meanwhile, at my son’s school curriculum night, his teacher showed us some little squares of yellow paper, referred to in Kindergarten parlance as Golden Tickets. Children earn a Golden Ticket by being exceptionally well-behaved. For those of us who looked worried about our child’s ability to ever meet this sky-high threshold, she guaranteed that every child would be sure to earn one during the year. Not only did this reassure me, it also put me under the impression that Golden Tickets would be scarce.

After two weeks of school, what does the boy bring home but a Golden Ticket. Okay, I thought, the teacher is unloading Golden Tickets early to get the kids excited about good behavior and spread some confidence. We’ll make a big deal out of this one, because we don’t know how many we’ll see once things in the classroom get real.

As expected, the boy asked to go to Shrimp that night. Who am I to refuse the bearer of a Golden Ticket? At the restaurant he shoveled sushi away like the deserving soul he was. When the bill came, I was first struck by poverty, and then by genius. “If you want to come back here again,” I told him, “you’ll have to earn another Golden Ticket.”

I felt good about the months of dinner savings I had just won for myself. This child was the perfect blend of his mother’s talkative nature and his father’s rebelliousness to invite a long drought of Golden Tickets. His most strenuous efforts to win favor would be doomed by biology.

Four whole days later, my wife called me at work with a message from the boy. “He wants you to guess what he brought home from school,” she said.

There was a substantial part of me that hoped for head lice. But I knew the awful, golden truth.

It’s going to be a long, expensive year. My genius lies shattered on the ground – under the table with the rice crumbs from my son’s three plates of shrimp tempura.

Fridge of Golden Tickets

Since the writing of this post, we have acquired a third Golden Ticket. We’re going to need more Presidents and sting rays.

Conversations with my wife: Chicken, waffles, and the dry heaves

When my wife found some of those new Chicken & Waffles flavored potato chips in the grocery store, she was very excited. No, chicken and waffles is not her favorite dish. She’s never had chicken and waffles in her life. The first time she saw it on a menu, she thought it was a misprint. She’s never come close to trying it at a restaurant.

It’s all about the potato chip. For a long time, her entire adult life, at least, she has fantasized about new and exotic potato chip flavors. She tells me that they should make a this-and-that-flavored chip. I nod and agree. Sometimes they actually do come out with her flavor, or one resembling it. Then she gets upset and asks me why I didn’t submit her idea first, when we still could have been made rich by it. I shrug and apologize.

Whether or not they stole her idea for their newest flavor, she wants to taste it. She wants to have experienced every potato chip flavor known to mankind. Chicken & Waffles was never her idea, which spared me a scolding, and that is the best thing I can say about it.

I came in from the garage with the last load of groceries to find her slumped over the kitchen sink.

ME: “What’s wrong?”

WIFE: (Gagging noise.) “Oh my God, they’re wretched.” (Gagging noise.)

ME: “What is?”

WIFE: (Hacking into the sink, points at the newly opened bag of chips on the counter beside her.) “Get me some juice!”

ME: “I told you it was a horrible idea.”

WIFE: (Between hacks.) “Don’t talk! Get juice!”

ME: “What kind of juice?”

WIFE: “JUICE! NOW!”

ME: “Here.” (Handing her a glass of juice.)

WIFE: (Downs juice in three gulps. Turns to me with watering eyes.) “That is the worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. I’ve never had anything so wretchedly horrible. There’s never been a food so awful. It literally made me puke.”  (She picks up the bag and shoves it into my chest.) “You have to try one.”

What could go wrong?

Is the world this desperate? Somebody should be working on Tar & Feathers flavored chips right about now.

If you can’t stand the heat, don’t install a molten lava floor in your kitchen

I cook most of the dinners at our house. There is something about the sight of me cooking dinner that makes our one-year-old especially needy. We make faces and giggle and play at all times of the day, but the only hour at which he consistently needs to be held by me is the one in which I am trying to cook dinner.

Given the choice of being held by me or by his mother, it is probably 70/30 in favor of Mommy, except when I am cooking. When I am cooking, he sees no other arms but mine. Only these arms can keep him from a crying fit when there is something sizzling on the stove.

Parents learn to do much with one hand. Our days are a routine of picking things up one at a time, in the order necessary to complete what would be thoughtless tasks to freewheeling, two-handed, childless types. Still, there are some things that are nearly impossible to do with a child in one arm, like hoisting a roast out of the crock pot or forming dough into a pizza shape.

My son doesn’t care what I can’t do one-handed. Cooking is daddy-toddler together time. He lets me know this by wrapping his arms around my legs as I’m trying to walk to get the butter. If I want to move freely between the fridge and the stove, I’d better pick him up.

Butterworth's demise

“Pick me up or Mrs. Butterworth gets it!”

By picking him up I’ve jumped from the frying pan onto the electric coil, because putting him down again is bound to be an ordeal. When a toddler is okay with being put down, he lets his feet down to meet the floor. When I try to put my son down so I can strain the pasta, he lifts up the landing gear like the floor is hot lava.

Touching hot lava dismays children, even when it is cool and made of linoleum. I am reminded of this every time I attempt to set a child down in it. Having to sit in hot lava while a heartless parent cuts up chicken breast is the worst fate imaginable. It makes a child cry. A lot. Much more than necessary. Especially since no crying is necessary. But it might distract Daddy enough to make him cut his finger, and that would teach him some respect for bonding time.

Cooling lava

A panoramic view of our kitchen floor after it has cooled down a bit from dinner time. (Image: Robert Bonine)

It’s not only that holding a child while cooking is inconvenient. There are things involved with cooking that are hotter than metaphorical lava. This means the boy has to be upset with me from across the room as I pull a dish out of the oven. But when safety is not an issue, I have learned to do all sorts of food prep with one hand.

If you wonder what this looks like, just imagine the Heisman trophy statue. Only, imagine a one-year-old tucked under the left arm, instead of a football. Then imagine that the outstretched right arm is holding a whisk.

Make a wish and blow out the candles on your bacon

My four-year-old son is not big on breakfast. We’ve struggled to find a food that inspires him to eat in the morning.

During the week, I’m gone before he gets up, but I was able to persuade him to eat a pancake some weekend mornings. When we could find bacon on sale, we might add that to the pancake breakfast. He developed quite a taste for the bacon.

Eventually, his palate tired of the pancakes, but he sensed that they were necessary baggage to his enjoyment of bacon. Unfortunately for him, we are most often without bacon. Sure, it tastes wonderful, but it’s pretty expensive for a food whose main purpose is to clog your heart with goo. Lacking bacon, our morning conversations go like this:

ME: “Would you like me to make you a pancake for breakfast?”

BOY: “If there’s bacon, I’ll have a pancake and bacon. Otherwise, I don’t want a pancake.”

ME: “How about a pancake and bacon, with no bacon?”

BOY: “No. I’ll just have a pancake with bacon.”

It’s rare that I can sell a pancake without bacon anymore.

The last time we had bacon, we were all sitting around the breakfast table, discussing his upcoming birthday.  “I think I want bacon for my birthday,” the boy declared. “I want bacon instead of cake.” His mother and I like bacon too; if he wants us to spend the cake money on bacon, that’s fine with us. We shrugged and said it was okay.

That must have seemed too easy, so he made sure we understood. “The bacon is instead of cake. It’s not my present.” Bacon is delicious, but it’s still only food. Food is not an appropriate birthday present for a boy who has seen the wonders housed within the magical walls of Toys R Us.

birthday bacon

I suggest that he wish for a significant price drop in the pork belly futures market.

Later, as we drove to get groceries, the boy piped up from the back seat with another bolt from the blue:

BOY: “Daddy, I think I’ll need a bow tie, if I’m gonna go anywhere fancy.”

ME: “Oh?”

BOY: “Yeah. Not one that you have to tie. Just one that you snap on.”

ME: “Where are you going that’s fancy?”

BOY: “I don’t know, but just in case I do.”

I hope he wasn’t envisioning his birthday party as a black tie affair, because bacon and ice cream don’t really wear well on a tux. Besides, if he wants to look like a junior Orville Redenbacher, he’s going to have to finance that fashion statement on his own.

At the end of our shopping trip, we passed through the bakery section of the store. The boy stopped and gazed through the glass at all the sweet treats. “Well, I think I do really want a cake instead of bacon for my birthday,” he said.

“How about a cake shaped like bacon?” his mother asked.

“No. I want it to look like an army vehicle.”

Oh well. Bacon was starting to sound good, but I like cake too.