I stood up at the dinner table and yelled, “We are not going to fight about food! Mommy works with food, and Mommy loves food!”
It was like one of those near-death experiences in which I rose above the table and observed myself shrieking at my kids.
The truth about mothers and children and food lies somewhere between the sugar-dusted memories of fresh-baked after-school cookies and the drive-through closest to the soccer field.
Moms share a secret: Even those of us who love to cook don’t always feel like cooking dinner. We love delving into cookbooks and magazines, when we have time. We love an all-day cooking project, when we have time.
But coupon clipping, grocery shopping, meal planning, vegetable chopping, and dish-washing? Not so much.
Mom and Grandma surely didn’t love all that, either, but they managed to pass on to me the creative charge I get when I’m in the kitchen.
But the night I yelled at the dinner table, we were in a power struggle and all of us were losing. The kids would complain to get a rise out of me, and I was angry during what should have been “family time.” The fact that Mommy had gone back to work writing about food when they entered elementary school, then shouted at them over dinner will be fodder for family therapy.
In fact, my daughter Miranda, 11, recently confessed that she feels left out when I lose myself in a cooking project. I was shocked and hurt that she would interpret my zen moments as shutting her out. “Cooking for you guys is how I show you I love you. I wish you would cook with me,” I told her through tears.
But my mother understood how Miranda could get the wrong impression. “You get so engrossed that you can hardly talk to anyone. It’s such a creative thing, cooking.”
Mom seemed happy to share that creativity with little helpers in her narrow galley kitchen, even when my brother went through his cake-baking phase.
And she managed to raise two kids with few eating issues – I hope I haven’t already blown it with my two. She did it by playing it cool, never raising the stakes much above the “just try it, dear” rule, and looking the other way when her daughter, cheeks packed with green beans, asked to be excused to use the bathroom.
I try to make dinners that most of us (my husband, daughter and I) like, and my son Nicky, 9, knows he can always make himself a ham-and-cheese sandwich if the sautéed shrimp is too scary.
In fact, Miranda has become quite a gourmet, offering goat cheese and sesame crackers to playmates who back away in horror, apparently more accustomed to Kraft singles and saltines.
As a kid, I was always the last one at the table, trying to meet the three-bite rule for each horrid vegetable, and finally being excused to play hide-and-seek with a wad of flank steak between my cheek and gum. I liked my mom’s flank steak recipe so much, I insisted on submitting it for my fifth-grade class cookbook. It called for two things: a flank steak and a packet of Lawry’s seasoning.
I remember Mom saying, “Kristy, are you sure you want to use this one? Don’t you want to do cookies instead?” I insisted, and to her credit, she went along with her little food editor. I keep that mimeographed cookbook here at work, and I can still taste Carla Bliss’s Magic Marshmallow Crescent Rolls, which I improved with this note: “Good esp. with apple: add 1 peeled, thinly sliced apple.”
I was such a picky eater, my mom and her friends in the Westminster Gourmet Group still laugh that I ended up in this job. I say it was all preparation. Even the shoutin’.
Food editor Kristen Browning-Blas can be reached at 303-820-1440 or kbrowning@denverpost.com.
