[Sca-cooks] P B & J

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

On Aug 24, 2009, at 1:46 PM, David Friedman wrote:
>>  feed children like you feed adults, and they will develop a good
>>  palate and an attitude that they can try new things.
>
>  That was our theory.
>
>  We ended up with children some of whose standard favorites were 13th
>  century Islamic, but who were still very conservative with regard to
>  anything unfamiliar to them. Our daughter, at 19, is getting more
>  adventurous, but her brother, 16, is still very reluctant to eat at
>  any ethnic restaurant that isn't Chinese, Japanese, Italian, or
>  Persian, and not all that enthusiastic about restaurants in those
>  categories other than the ones he is used to.

My daughter was eating spicy Thai food around the age of 2. I tried 
not to give it to her, sucking off the spicy sauce and giving her the 
meat or vegetable. But she could see through my ploy and was quite 
insistent on trying the real thing, so i had a glass of milk handy 
and gave her very tiny tastes. She loves spicy food. On her 4th 
birthday she ate snails with garlic butter - her own request. As a 
small child she also enjoyed eating all sorts of sushi and Thai 
squid. She was willing to try almost anything. My rule was taste it 
and if you don't like it, don't eat it. There were always enough 
dishes to eat so if she didn't like one, there was still plenty.

Two things she really disliked were lamb (i don't like it either - 
probably a genetic issue involving how it tastes) and eggplant 
prepared by her step-mother. She got over the eggplant issue when she 
was served some properly prepared eggplant. She also very early 
developed a strong dislike for fast food burgers when she was 
rewarded by her teacher with a coupon for a free meal at McDonald's. 
She had had the experience of eating high quality burgers and good 
French fries, so she never wanted to go back.

She has been a vegetarian since she was about 11. In college she 
lived for a while in Morocco (semester abroad) and in France, and 
spent a fair bit of time in traveling in Spain. She has since visited 
Turkey and Japan. Because of the difficulties of getting vegetarian 
food while traveling in some countries, within the past year she has 
begun accepting sea food in her diet, although she still tends to 
vegetarian dishes when they are available.

someone sometimes called Urtatim