Meal Planning for the Juvenile Palate, or, Why I Should Just Give Up and Feed Everyone F@*$ing Cereal

I’ve been trying to plan meals more lately - like so I shop intentionally at the grocery store and not drift toward whatever sounds delicious and make enough of something so that there’s enough left to eat for another night or two or freeze for later. There are all these web sites that tell you how to make meals for a month in one Saturday afternoon and get all the ingredients at Aldi for $100. Most of them want you to pay for this unrealistic plan that will leave you chopping green peppers until 3 a.m. and running out of Zip-Loc bags, freezer space and sanity.

Before I had a kid, I wasn’t very intentional about this sort of thing. I’d throw together whatever sounded good to me (my favorite: plain spaghetti topped with shredded cheddar cheese, parmesan and bacon bits accompanied by strawberries), and my husband would eat a bowl of cereal. Then an hour or two later he’d eat a bunch of crappy junk food. We both work full-time. He can’t cook for anything (he has multiple times left the cardboard on the bottom of a frozen pizza when putting it in the oven and has thrice confused sour cream for cream cheese when I asked him to get one of the items at the grocery store), and I don’t have much time after getting home. 

But now that I have a child that’s a month away from 2 years old, I want to ensure we have family dinners and that everyone, especially him, is getting a nutritious meal, and we’re eating it together. After an enjoyable time cooking, we then discuss our days while my husband and son gratefully shovel food into their mouths. 

This is a glorious idea in my head. In reality, it usually plays out like this: I frantically try to follow a recipe to get something on the table within 30 minutes before my husband gets hangry and my son throws a fit. Husband is supposed to be watching son to keep him out of my way when cooking. Husband instead gets mesmerized by The Simpsons on TV, develops tunnel vision and hearing, and son comes into kitchen and starts going through cabinets trying to find his favorite colander or whines at me because I won’t let him play with the paring knife. Once the meal is ready, my son shoves the food away before even trying it or better yet, throws it on the floor and screams for graham crackers instead. My husband proclaims not to like one of the ingredients and pushes the food around on his plate. I dream of the time when it was just me and my cheesy spaghetti with bacon bits and a side of strawberries.

I guess a toddler is sort of entitled to be an a-hole about food. I hear this is normal, but it seems like everyone I know with a toddler has a much easier time. They share recipes on social media with annoying comments like “Johnny just loved this lentil and quinoa dish! A great source of protein, too!” My son really only likes protein if it comes in the form of processed meat. The more nitrates, the more wiling he is to eat it - cured ham, smoked sausage, hot dogs. But grilled, seasoned, free range chicken breast lovingly prepared by his mother? Hell no. He will have fried chicken nuggets, though, but only if he can dip them in barbecue sauce with high-fructose corn syrup as the No. 1 ingredient. (Despite all this, he is still below-the-charts skinny for his age, which usually makes me cave and give him the damn graham crackers with peanut butter because I fear he’ll starve otherwise.) Another friend of mind told me the only thing her 1-year-old daughter won’t eat is asparagus. That’s it! Laid end to end, one serving of each thing my child will not eat would encircle planet earth. 

But that’s apparently just a toddler thing. Right along with naps and pooping in their pants. My 33-year-old husband, however, gives most toddlers a run for their money on pickiness. Before I met him nine years ago, I thought I was picky. A former coworker accused me of having a “juvenile palate” because I don’t like seafood, eggs, mushrooms, many steamed vegetables, most things that mix sweet and salty together, and Asian food (which notoriously mixes sweet and salty together, so you can see my logic there). But no, I am the world’s most adventurous omnivore compared to my husband. 

Below is a list of things he won’t eat, with rare exceptions and clarifications in parentheses:

All fruit (once or twice a year, he will eat a Red Delicious apple)

Vegetables (will occasionally eat broccoli, asparagus and Caesar salad)

Potatoes that “taste too potato-ey" (i.e. only consumes French Fries and seasoned roasted potatoes that are flavored just so)

Sour cream

Pretty much anything with a high fiber content

Any jelly flavor other than grape

Meatballs/meatloaf

Seafood (which I am totally OK with because I hate it, too)

Soup (with the exception of French onion)

And these are things he doesn’t like very much but will eat occasionally if I beg him:

Ground beef (but will happily eat hamburgers, which are just smooshed ground beef)

Pasta (it really doesn’t matter the sauce or meat or veggies accompanying it, he “just doesn’t like pasta very much”)

Rice

Salad

Generic brand products (despite no evidence to back up his position, he firmly believes store-brand pretzels are inferior to the ones that cost $2 more per bag)

So, internet meal planning mavens, what have you got to fit into those specifications, eh? Because all I’ve been able to come up with is just boxes and boxes of Goldfish crackers and Cheerios.