Multicultural knowledge
Tonight, as I mentioned in my previous post, we had a (very good, but likely not authentic) Chinese dish. Kelli came up with the recipe herself, by combining a few other recipes and some experimentation.
As always when we try a new dish, we were a little concerned about how the children would respond. They’re all picky eaters, and subject to quirks where they even won’t eat foods that they typically like. So we were hoping for the best. Adam is usually willing to eat foods with strong or spicy flavors, so I wasn’t too concerned about him. Sarah usually follows him in this regard, but sometimes she’ll just decide to be difficult; for instance, she’ll rarely eat any potato dish (french fries being an exception, of course). Brian is the most difficult. Until recently, he’d roundly refuse anything with any sort of unusual flavor. For a long time he wouldn’t eat pizza if it had red sauce, and even now don’t dare try to feed him Italian food! But over the past month or so he’s become much better about being willing to try (and usually liking) new foods, so I was hopeful that it’d be a success with him too.
In fact, our hopes were realized — all the kids liked the food a lot and ate really well. Things were going so well that, near the end of the meal, I commented “wow, you guys did so good, next time maybe we’ll use chopsticks.” Adam got a good laugh out of that, although we learned immediately that it was because he thought it was a silly thing to say:
- Adam: “What are chopsticks?”
- Brian: “They’re something you use to eat Mexican food!”
I guess now that our kids are a little more open-minded, we’re going to have to work on the multicultural food and eating techniques thing a bit…