Published in the
My Best Eater Turns Picky
I met my husband over thirty-five years ago and since then have seen him eat anything and everything. When we first started dating, I baked him a Banana Crème Pie. He poured the pie into a glass, drank it, and asked for seconds. That’s when I knew I loved him, who else would have known what to do with pie that flowed instead of jelled? My husband has always been a good eater. In fact, in our family, he has always been my best eater. He’s not picky…so I thought.
My husband’s
indiscriminate appetite did not prepare me for my first child’s peculiar eating
habits. As a two-year-old my young son ate
cooked beets but not hot dogs. He loved
broiled fish but wouldn’t touch hamburgers. Tuna
surprise was out, crab was in. When my son
turned five, his favorite meal included steak, green peas, milk, and chocolate cake with
no frosting. While all the other children were
celebrating their birthdays at McDonald’s, we were having sit-down dinners at Bonanza
Steak House. For party games we played “Don’t
bother the retirees in the smoking section.”
But, it was not until my daughter was born, that I truly learned what “picky” meant. She would eat nothing unless it had sugar in it, on it, or under it. To this day she will eat a cookie faster than you can say Oreo. My challenge was to convince her that strawberry-swirl ice cream did not qualify as a fruit nor did milk need a chocolate syrup chaser. As a child my daughter ate little meat and no beef. If she had been the prodigal daughter, we would not have been able to kill the fatted calf upon her return; we would have had to grill lean veggie burgers instead. To her, the other white meat was (and still is) tofu.
Neither of my children would eat anything blackened on the grill, baked in a sauce, or mixed with vegetables. Bananas had to be nearly green and asparagus had to be boiled to a pulp. Of course, my husband would always eat everything on his plate and then whatever was left on theirs. He learned long ago the value of being a member of the clean plates club. My husband’s concern over uneaten food had nothing to do with any moral responsibility to starving children anywhere on the planet. He ate heartily because he loved to eat. I have seen him gnaw pickled pig’s feet, nibble marrow out of bones, bite into a tongue sandwich when offered, or savor scrambled brains if available.
My husband entered the “Will Eat Anything” Hall of Fame the night he readily ate my Chicken Liver Chop Suey. That meal of chicken livers mixed with celery, green peppers, and canned bean sprouts in a hot mustard brown sauce pushed Chinese cooking back one thousand years. Even though I still have that recipe in an old Weight Watcher’s cookbook, I have not made Chicken Liver Chop Suey since that night. Admittedly it was not my finest hour as a cook.
To further demonstrate why my husband has always been my best eater, let me list those foods I have served him over the years: main dishes over-cooked or burned (I’m not a good cook); rancid elk hamburger (I thought that was how elk tasted); free range chickens or penned up (he didn’t care), tough steak, rare steak, larger the better steak. While most people are motivated by money, he would do almost anything for crème brulee or skillet-fried chicken.
And then last Thursday, my best eater turned picky. I served soup of chicken, sausage and onions in a flavored broth. My husband is now on a high protein diet so I have tried to support his efforts by serving only meats and “allowed vegetables”. He ate the sausage, the vegetables, and scooped up the broth, but I noticed that he had slipped most of the chicken to the side of his bowl. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he got up to rinse off his dishes. Stopping him just before he threw the chicken down the disposal, I asked why he had not eaten it. He sheepishly confessed that it tasted too dry. “TOO DRY,” I blurted. “It was cooked in a broth!” He claimed that he liked only moist chicken now. I accepted my husband’s sudden eating turn-around and found a solution. I ate the chicken. I am now the newest member of the clean plates club.
My doctor wants me to lose ten pounds by October. I’m sorry, Dr. Foley, but I don’t think that’s possible. Unfortunately, I have just become my own best eater.