Why Don't I Just Bring You Some Spaghetti with that Risotto?

Maybe you are familiar with this neurosis within Italian-American families.  Or maybe you aren't.  Let me advise you.  Whenever you visit the Italian side of your fiancee's family, never--and I mean NEVER EVER--contemplate piling multiple starches on your dinner plate.  (Technically, they would never make such a faux pas, but maybe they are testing you).  Make a gaffe and you will be responsible for starting a conflagration of this magnitude:

Big Night Risotto Scene

And let's face it, Tony Shalhoub is right (when is he not?).  What person in her right mind would put two or (God forbid) three starches on a dinner table?  Actually, I have an answer for that.  My husband, whose family origin can best be described as "European Eclectic", has a passion for carbohydrates.  At Christmas and Easter there is puska, a sweet, rich bread dyed deep yellow from the amount of eggs and butter in the mix.  It can happily accompany stuffing (Hungarian and bread varieties), mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes and dinner rolls on the holiday table.  I cannot convey to you the level of my horror when I first witnessed such a display.  Memories of my mother revising dinner menus up till the last moment to make sure there was a perfect balance of meat, vegetables and starch rose up before me like the Wave of Kanagawa.

So now it is time to 'fess up.  Below you will see the evidence of my guilt...the very image of what my life has become:

Can you see the transgression, friends?  One might be able to forgive the crusty baguette meant to accompany the spaghetti, but the roasted potatoes?!  A starch with a starch next to a starch.  It made my mother gasp and declare that she was not hungry.  It made me take stock of my life.  The fact is, I overturned the cosmic order of the dinner table for one reason: I was trying to get Ciccio to eat something. 

Was it worth replacing the yin and yang of gustatory harmony with a yin and a yin and a yin?  The original dinner was (wait for it) Mahi Mahi poached on a bed of herbs and the rosemary roasted potatoes.  *Snort*.  Who was I kidding?  As I rushed to put the table together, my principles fell apart before the plates were set.  I did some quick back-tracking and threw spaghetti into a pot.  (Another rule of thumb is this: always have sauce ready to go).  All of those years of indoctrination--meat, vegetable, starch--like a culinary syntax being drummed into my head, governing every cooking act I had accomplished, gone in the blink of an eye.  And why?  A picture is worth a thousand words:

Yes.  All principles go out the window for the moment when this child opens his mouth and eats.  Okay, not all.  I still have my lines in the sand.  But clearly on this evening, the line did not encompass the starch exclusivity rule.  Now I begin to wonder just how far I am willing to go. What's next?  Will chicken nuggets--perhaps with a side of risotto--make their way into my house?  (If only you could see my face at this moment).  Ciccio knows what he likes and the list is short: nutella, peanut butter, spaghetti.  He has his own culinary syntax.  While I may scream if I get another glob of peanut butter on my fingers,  the satisfaction of a mostly empty plate almost ranks right up there with finishing my dissertation.  Well, almost.

This incident highlighted an unexpected complication.  The fact is, Ciccio did not eat potatoes with his spaghetti.  He sensibly downed a quarter cup of pasta and nibbled on the bread before slinking away from the table while we pretended not to notice.  My husband, on the other hand, dug in.  I can only imagine that his house finally felt a little more like home that night.  And the Mahi Mahi?  As beautiful as it looked, it was undercooked and had to go back in the oven.  Nobody had fish for dinner and the table suddenly looked overwhelmed by...bread.  I am thankful that Mom (our personal Tony Shalhoub) decided that she wasn't hungry enough to sit down to dinner that night.

You might think that this incident made me shy away from starches for at least a few days, but if you stay tuned for the next two installments (cabbage and noodles and rice balls), you will see that I have bounced back quite nicely.

All Children Love Macaroni and Cheese

Tested: Giada di Laurentiis' "Baked Macaroni and Cheese Cupcakes", Episode Giada's Kidz Kitchen: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/baked-macaroni-and-cheese-cupcakes-recipe/index.html

Result: No Go (Ea and Ciccio), Met with Great Enthusiasm (Rina)

This is one of the first universal "truths" about childhood that has been perpetuated by moms and chefs throughout the ages since the invention of macaroni and cheese (which must have been, let's face it, somewhere in the 1950's).  Upon closer scrutiny, we must include certain addenda to this monolithic statement.  My first observation: people fall into one of three possible mac n' cheese categories.  Perhaps, as my oldest daugther Rina, you are an unabashed enthusiast.  This means that you will eat any combination of pasta and cheeses, either melted together on the stove top or melted and then baked in the oven until golden and bubbly.  If you are part of this group, you are equally enthusiastic about macaroni and cheese that comes from the blue box as you are about the gourmet version that Paula Deen infuses with enough fat content to stop your heart as you watch her show in hi-def. 

If you are under the age of 15, you likely live in the same camp as my daughter Ea, who believes--and who could blame her?--that any pasta worth eating resides in those trademark tall, slender cardboard boxes, blue or otherwise.  No variations are allowed, either in pasta shape or cheese flavoring.  Oh, you might be able to get away with a cheese powder that isn't yellow, for instance; but don't go thinking that this person will sit at your table and polish off an alfredo version of the classic dish, or, say, rotini instead of elbows.  May God be with you if you try. 

Then there are the hard-core mac n' cheese heretics, the Arians of the pasta and cheese world who would deny the divinity of this staple dish.   Such people cannot be convinced that such a dish could be tasty or even remotely good for you.  My son, Ciccio, adheres to this philosophy.  So it is always with great amusement that I observe every television personality (chef or otherwise) tout the universal mangia-bility of this dish.  I have also been told that mac n' cheese is the ideal camouflage for undesirable foodstuffs, such as vegetables and other hideous fruits of the earth.  To use modern parlance: iGuffaw. 

But perhaps you don't understand my skepticism?  You are probably thinking, what food tragedy is lurking in her past that makes her so bitterly opposed to such an innocuous dish?  I should take this moment to identify myself a little bit more, to give you a better sense of who I am and dispel any suspicions that I, myself, have a thing against food.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

In my semi-large Italian-American family (there were seven of us all together--is that large?), food was absolutely about nourishment.  I remember my mother coming home from a full day's work and going immediately into the kitchen to make epic portions of chicken with tomatoes, onions and potatoes or legions of cutlets baked in the oven until they were crispy and juicy.  Her brood was hungry--and needed to be fed immediately! We did not eat out at all (who could afford it?)  and we did not eat much in the way of junk food or fast food. 

It didn't occur to my brothers and me that the food we got at home was quite different from what our "more" American friends ate at their houses.  The overcooked chicken tenders, canned vegetables and, of course, boxed macaroni and cheeses that they endured daily seemed like foreign cuisine to me.  My friends were also inevitably banned from drinking during dinner (so that they would eat more), a situation that distressed me then as much as, say, the idea of waterboarding distresses me now.  Everything that we ate in our house might have been recognized generically by our neighbors--seafood, pork, chicken, vegetables--but the form that they took in my mother's hands raised the raw ingredients to the outer limits of the American imagination. 

Seafood meant fresh blue crabs, chased around the kitchen floor by my brothers and me until a minute before they hit the boiling water; the beautiful white flesh of squid, purple tentacles dangling out of our mouths as we tried to make a sibling laugh hard enough to shoot drink out of his nose (yes, somehow we were allowed to eat and drink); mussels that my mother scrubbed up in the sink and steamed in a large pot on the stove.  The Gorton's fisherman did not know our address.  

Meatballs, yes.  But these were filled with raisins and pinoli nuts, a surprise that I cannot imagine would be very welcome to small children these days.  They were my father's favorite and because of my devotion to him, I preferred them above the regular ones.  The vegetables we prized resembled weeds rather than anything commercially sanctioned (though broccoli rabe is quite hip now).  Weeds and bread would be more than enough for a beautiful lunch.  Mac n' cheese?  Somehow, I don't remember it. 

I couldn't guess then what I know now.  Dinner is about more than food; it is the most efficient vehicle of tradition and culture, especially in a land that has none of its own to impart to its citizens.  Companies may tell us what to eat: the Jolly Green Giant and Mr. Gorton and the Blue Box will tell us what children like to eat (and should eat!) in the absence of families with a strong ethnic background and family members with a cultural memory.  You might think, then, that Ciccio's problem with mac n' cheese is my problem with it: its total lack of memorability, the homogenous blend of cheeses that came from who knows where. 

But that would imply that he hungered for something more authentic or culturally consistent. This, my friends, is simply not the case.  He doesn't like cheese.  He doesn't want pasta with "stuff on it".  So what we have here is a mom with a philosophy and a kid with a texture problem.  At the moment, we both concur: there has to be a better food substance for this boy.  At least we have pasta.  Now we just have find a suitable partner for it.

Taking Advice

When I became a parent, I thought I had things under control:  I would wake in the morning, bathe the baby, go to the market to buy ingredients for dinner before her morning nap, put her down when I got home and then work on my dissertation for two or three hours before my angel woke with a smile, ready to play and make those little baby noises that, well, babies make.    The problem with this vision was simple: it wasn't really my vision.  It wasn't about my child.  I was participating in a kind of collective dream vision about what new motherhood should be like, according to People Who Know.  These people included some of the most unlikely characters: scholarly mentors who didn't have children, future colleagues (who claimed that caring for cats was the same as raising children), well-meaning relatives with incredibly (implausibly?) positive attitudes.

From these acquaintances I learned that it was possible to breastfeed my baby with one arm and type on my computer with the other.  I learned that if everything went according to schedule--a schedule that I alone had control over--I would succeed as though nothing in my life had ever changed.  I also found out that continuing to breastfeeding would prevent (or fix) every bad thing that could befall my baby: warts, low IQ, gross obesity, picky eating habits, allergies and general ugliness.  But what happens when baby doesn't have any tolerance for other people's opinions...including her own mother's?

My first daughter, Rina, helped me figure this out.  She never slept.  Ever.  She despised diaper changes.  Screams filled our apartment from dawn to dusk and beyond.   Her body stubbornly refused any nourishment from my breast milk and quickly plummeted into the frightening depths of hypoglycemia.  I was learning one of the most important and humbling lessons I had ever learned in my life.  It wasn't about me anymore. My ideas of motherhood and childhood, formed on the models I had seen around me and the advice that people freely gave, no longer counted.  The new love of my life was experiencing the world in her own way and she quickly formed her own ideas about how things should go.  My apparently ridiculous ideas about things like sleep, cooperation while being dressed and bathed, and breastfeeding quickly got smashed into itty, bitty, teeny-tiny, little molecules.  My copy of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding (the one that sat on my bedside table and that I had been studying for nine months) was immediately donated to Someone Who Still Had Ideals.

You could say that I was liberated from the prison of my own ideas.  Or you could say that I was living inside total panic.  What if I couldn't even feed my own child?  My husband took the practical approach: he drove to the store, bought bottles and formula, mixed up a batch and solved that problem right away. My relief was short-lived.  Somehow, what goes into a baby's body is regarded as the sole province of the mother, but her choices about nourishment become public property.  Once again, everyone had an opinion.  Strangers standing behind us in line at the store would look at my daughter's round face (ignoring her long, overly lean body) and say, "My, she's fat!  I'll bet she's bottle-fed."

And that's where it began.  Right then.  The battle lines about food were already being drawn in my mind.  At the time, the field looked like this: Me v. Them.    When my second child, my son Ciccio, was born three-and-a-half years later (and then again when little sister, Ea, joined us another 3 years after that), the battlefield morphed into a multi-dimensional war zone that came alive every night at the dinner table. 

I naively approached these childhoods with supreme confidence, as if I hadn't learned my lesson.  Besides, there were qualified people out there who could tell me what to do about children who won't eat anything.  Why, just the other day, I was delighted to find that new mother and chef extraordinaire Giada di Laurentiis (may she live a thousand years) has a new show focusing on how to cook so that children will eat.  What could Ciccio and Ea possibly dish that I hadn't already lived through or that Giada and an entire industry that has sprung up around difficult eaters couldn't fix? 

Well, my friends, you are about to find out.  Actually, we are about to find out, together.  After reading special publications, buying cute "kid-friendly" cookbooks, attempting fanciful plating--including the famous "hiding the vegetables" tactic that seems to work for everybody else--I'm ready to conclude that there are just some children who defy everything.  But not just yet.  I'm an analytical person and I like to experiment.  So this is the plan: to try out as many dishes labeled "kid-friendly" or touted as being "able to fool children into eating things they don't like" as I can on Ea and Ciccio (Rina might as well be the control, since she pretty much eats everything, despite being ruined by bottle-feeding).  I will include the recipes I use, the sources they come from, pictures of our dinners (before and after) and whether or not certain persons went to bed hungry.  Think of it as a culinary version of "MythBusters." 

And the point of all this?  Perhaps I just want to comfort myself by knowing there really are people out there with good advice.  But really, I'd be content to win some of those battles.