Litte foodies?

Before kiddos, E and I were sorta gourmands.  We took cooking classes together - even when we were in Italy.  We could tell you if creamed corn incorporated the use of truffle oil.  We tried anything and everything.  I remember one ill-fated attempt at braciola that ended with us throwing away enough food to feed 8 people.  More often than not though, our test dishes turned into delicious staples and we ended up loving them.  Cooking together was a fun, interesting way to spend time together and very conducive to talking.  Plus, what's not to love about a date where you spend the whole time actually TALKING to each other?  Oh, and there's the added bonus of wine.  Any recipe that calls for wine just begs to have the rest of the bottle taken care of.  So there you go.  Foodies.  At least wannabes.

Fast forward a few years and here we are.  Two kids, not much time, and lots and lots of things to do.  We still love food and wine, but our time to enjoy it is vastly decreased.  We've devised a system in which we cook the next night's dinner after the boys go to bed.  This results in us eating lots and lots of casseroles with side salads.  Bo-ring.  But Sunday afternoon during naptime we've started making interesting and exciting dishes again.  It makes both of us happy.  Also, we're trying to raise little epicures.  We love food - so should they.

Apparently our best attempts at getting N to love fancy dishes are ill-fated.  No matter what we put in front of him these days, he meets with the following responses - "No.", "Cheeseburger!", "Pizza", and/or the ever popular "Cracker!".  Right.  Instead of this thing we spent an hour preparing, we'll give you some Ritz crackers.  It's frustrating.  But I suppose normal, given he's almost 2.  Nothing like hearing a request for cheeseburgers at 7 am and seeing a toddler dissolve into tears because we won't provide the requested cheeseburgers and tell him that "he can eat his pancakes" to make you frustrated with food.

So we were excited to find that caching things as his favorite dishes works wonders.  He'll eat almost anything if you can throw in a label he likes.  For instance, when we served him eggplant Parmesan, he refused to eat it.  We took the plate away, brought it back without changing a thing, and told him it was "eggplant pizza".  He ate ALL of it and requested more.  Do we feed bad about this?

No.

PS - A few meals after the "Cheeseburgers!" request we actually made him cheeseburgers because - hey - he planted the seed and it sounded pretty dang tasty.  He proceeded to eat the bun and pick all the cheese off of the meat.  At least he was happy.