From a child's mouth, truth

As Baby1 grows her vocabulary and those descriptive terms to tell us how she feels about this and that, she has also been able to give me feedback about the food I'm cooking. On a couple of occasions, I'd ask her if she wanted to try more of this or that, and she'd reply, "Mmm, no, I am OK." That's code for "I don't like that dish so much." On other occasions, she has told me, "Mommy, this is yummy." That's code for, well, damn mommy, this is yummy.

So she has said, of my pasta sauce, stir fried chicken with black bean sauce, pasta alfredo, vegetable curries, chicken with spicy coconut sauce, several different curries, ground beef roasted in pumpkin, chicken soup, roasted chicken, chicken salad, and, occasionally, even salmon (I gotta admit, I'm not the best salmon cook, and often it comes out overcooked and too dry). But whenever she encounters spicy foods, she still gives me that bewildered whisper "spicy!" I've gotta work on those taste buds of hers, and get them used to spicy food. But, in the mean time, we're giving her definition to the different senses on her tongue - for flavors of sweet, spicy, salty, sour, bitter. Umami... I may have wait for a scrunch of her forehead with tasting something or other one of these nights, and be able to tell her the story of umami.

Still, no matter what success or failure was served at the table the night before, every night she sits at our table, eagerly anticipating dinner. Or, better yet, she has always wanted to see what is cooking on the stove and in the oven, even before she was able to walk. And it's at these moments that I find utmost joy, at her curiosity and her anticipation for our food, and she hasn't yet fallen into those childhood patterns of picky eating or distractions by play. Maybe part of the reason is that I've engaged her in my cooking, asking what she thought of one dish or another, and I'd reason with her the next go-around of the same dish, adjusting some flavor based on feedback from before. It has become a fantastic game for us, this cooking thing, and besides the fact that my cooking is often accompanied by an instantaneous unloading of all items in the lower drawers of our kitchen all over the floor, preparing our evening dinners is actually quite enjoyable.