Brilliant Benihana

It's been a while since I updated this, but had to share this.

Method #42011 to keep toddlers interested in food. Take them to the kitschy wonder which is Benihana.

A Wining Child

A couple years ago, my in-laws brought us a stick from Paso Robles. It was a bit of vine root for an exotic wine varietal called Mourvèdre, which isn’t a household name like Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, or Cabernet Sauvignon, but alone or blended, it is an essential part of the wines from Spain and southern France. We dropped it in the yard and forgot about it, until it suddenly exploded into a mess of vine, tendrils, and grapes this year.

We figured we could either let it be decorative or actually see if we could produce something drinkable. We’ve got a small herb garden growing in the bed outside the kitchen, and a blood orange tree, a Valencia orange tree, a pomelo tree, a loquat tree, and a macadamia tree – though the squirrels always get to the nuts before we get any. We think there’s value in showing Mikey where the stuff he eats and drinks comes from, even if in the case of the Mourvèdre, he can’t drink it yet.

As a rule of thumb, we learned, one vine can produce about a gallon of wine, which is about 5 bottles. We decided that was a good start.

The first step was constructing a trellis around the grapes to get them up off the ground. The standard is a two-wire trellis, which looks like a miniature phone line. Once we had it up, we could watch the grapes turn from green to red to midnight blue over the summer.

The next step, if we were less dilettantish about this, would be to determine the proper time to harvest them based on Brix sugar ratings from our (nonexistent) equipment. In our more casual approach, we went for general time (Mourvèdre tends to be ready for harvest later than other grapes, in October), look (they should look like balloons which have begun to lose some air), and taste (sweet and yummy).

Yesterday, after Mikey’s nap, I woke him up and asked him if he wanted to stomp on some grapes.

“Now?” he asked. “Yay!”

We took our five gallon bucket from Eagle Rock Supplies in Culver City (http://www.brewsupply.com/) and filled about half full with our harvest, stems and all. Then we began the stomp.

Mikey really got into it, though he was a little alarmed when a bright green spider ran up the side of the bucket, escaping from his squishing. One wonders how many crushed and decomposing spiders end up in the wine we drink everyday.

I removed a couple of stems from the mush, and then, there was only one other step for the day: adding a few grams of potassium metabisulfide to the mix to kill off the wild yeasts, to make room for the wine yeasts we’ll add tomorrow. Mikey wanted to help, of course. And then he wanted to add more.

It’s really no good explaining to a 3-year-old how too many sulfides in wine aren’t considered pleasant to the palate. The best you can do is yank the little package away and substitute with another toy. That works too.

First step done in the process of creating our small batch of Château Peterson-Smith 2011 Mourvèdre.

"A" Is For Afghan

I haven't written in a while, but the Sprog is, I’m happy to report, an adventurous eater. Yes, he’ll pick green off of his food, but he’ll try anything once. Or twice if we tell him he can’t have any more. At the end of this month, we’re going to my sister’s wedding in England, and then we’re taking a couple days in London and then going to France. While we were cuddling in bed this weekend, I said to him, “You know, while we’re in England and France, I’m going to ask you to try jellied eel, and frogs’ legs, and foie gras, and snail?”


The Sprog thought about it all, and nodded, and asked, “And spiders?”


Sure, why not?


It’s very easy to fall into a rut of serving our son the same thing because I know he likes it. We can go a long way with just shrimp and noodles. But with our belief that our child’s tastebuds should be cosmopolitan, my partner Ted and I are beginning on the alphabet tour of world cuisine. Every week if we can, but at least every month, we’re going to try the food from a different culture from A to Z.


Living in one of the world’s most diverse cities, we have a number of choices of where to begin. Argentinean, though we love it, seemed too easy, all steak and potatoes. Even easier, we could begin with traditional American, but we figured that’s the default. We wanted something exotic to start.


Afghanistan, of course, has been much in the news over the last ten years. We are evidently drawing our troops down from there, but we have also recently had the deadliest conflict of the war, with 38 people killed when their helicopter was shot down. There are maybe a dozen Afghan restaurants in the United States, and one of them – named Khybar – is only a few miles from me.


The Sprog loved the Qabili Palau, which was similar to an Indian rice palao, but with the addition of fried strips of carrots, raisins, almonds, and cubes of veal. Then there was the red lentil Dol, which I thought was some of the best I’ve ever tasted. Finally, the house winner, Mantu, of Uzbek origin, steamed dumplings filled with onions and beef, and then topped with beef curry and yogurt. Dainty and delicious.


So, “A” was a hit. Off to a good start.

Morocc 'N Roll

I’m not sure what to talk about: the Sprog’s enthusiastic embrace of the Moroccan feast I put together or his newfound taste for cat food. I think a little bit of both is part of the story.

Regarding the former, I first encountered Moroccan food myself about 25 years ago in Spain, and fell in love with it. I made pastilla for my friends here in L.A. a couple of years back, and they have requested it again, so this weekend, we went down to Huntington Beach for the occasion. While I cooked, Ted took the Sprog out for his first private flight on our host’s Cessna, out to Catalina Island and back.


When they returned, I put out the spread beginning with meze, the appetizers.

Grilled flatbread, falafel, roasted eggplant dip, olives cured until they resembled raisins, and Turkish salad with plenty of chickpeas.

The entrees were cous-cous with roasted vegetables, lamb tagine with apricots and dates, and the aforementioned pastille which is a sort of a pie with chicken, (one of my favorite things under the sun) preserved lemons, coriander, almonds, and cinnamon. The fact that my friends all dressed the part for the evening added to the magic, as did the Sprog devouring it all. For dessert, I made frozen mangos and yogurt, with rose water, orange flower water, cardamom, and pistachios. The Sprog just called it, “Ice cream.”

The taste for cat food is, of course, all about getting a reaction from us. It began when our cat Floyd sniffed at something the Sprog was eating, which aroused protestations.

“Don’t worry,” we assured him. “Floyd doesn’t like people food. He only likes cat food. You don’t like cat foot, do you?”

“No?” The Sprog replied, but you could see the wheels turning right then. A few hours later, he went into the office my partner Ted shares with the cat’s food bowl, and cleared his throat before demonstratively picking up a morsel of dry cat food and popping it in his mouth.

“Is that good or yucky?” I asked.

“Yucky!” the Sprog said, eyes shining.

But that didn’t stop him from popping another in his mouth. And another today, grinning away. Obviously, if we wanted to raise a critter that only ate cat food, we would have been content with Floyd, but we’re not worried: this pure shock value. There’s nothing about a kibble or a bit of cat food which would hurt the Sprog. If only there was a way to keep him from purring quite so loudly while bathing himself with his tongue …

"I Like It."

Tonight, Friday night, we usually take the Sprog out for sushi, but it was getting a little old, so we thought we’d take him somewhere closer to home. There’s a Southern / Soul Food restaurant on Ventura called Stevie’s Creole Café, and we were craving their fried chicken. They have live music there too, but luckily we got there at 6:30, before the crowds.

We have been thinking lately about the concept of the “family friendly” restaurant. So far, we haven’t had to go to a Chuck E. Cheese or something similar, but we won’t be surprised if that happens someday. We just want to put off that eventuality for as long as possible.

Our working definition of “family friendly” is a place that’s not so stuffy that a giggling child would be viewed as anything but a delight, and not so crowded that the Sprog can’t wander a bit. Because two-year-olds are not big on sitting still for long periods of time.

Stevie’s Creole Café fulfills those criteria, and it’s yummy. We got to a table right away, and ordered up fried oysters, barbecue ribs (Ted), and fried chicken (me). The Sprog first devoured two cornbread muffins. And then the fried oysters came, burning hot, and after Ted and I took bites and announced that we had to wait for them to cool down, the Sprog’s interest turned into fascination. He kept touching them to see if they were still hot, and when they had cooled a little, he took a bit.

“I like it,” he said. It’s a new phrase of his, though typical for a two-year-old “I don’t like it” came first.

Then we had grits, collard greens, red beans and rice, yams, and our chicken and ribs. He is a meat eater for sure, and between the hot, sweet sauce and the experience of gnawing meat off a bone, he became an instant rib fan.

“He sure likes his food,” said one of the other customers.

That he does.

Roe, Roe, Roe

For Ted's birthday a couple weeks ago, his brother brought over some Osetra caviar. We had it with buckwheat blinis and creme fraiche, and the Sprog clearly liked it, just a bit. "Ca Ya Ya."

Jamie Oliver's TED Speech

You may have seen this before, but worth watching if not:

"Picy!"

Last night was a typical weekday dinner, where there was nothing planned and only a few minutes to bang something out. For Ted and myself, I made a Singapore noodle hodgepodge with rice vermicelli, bean sprouts, cabbage, ginger, bok choy, chicken, and lots of curry. It sounded a little bit much for Mikey, so I gave him just the chicken and some of the noodles without the sauce. We all sat down and began eating, but Mikey was more interested in playing with his noodles than eating them. We didn’t let him throw more than a few noodles against the wall before taking it away, an action he didn’t protest. The meal ended with Mikey first in my lap, then in Ted’s, and then back in mine, eating our dinner.

It shouldn’t have surprised me. One, Mikey likes to eat whatever we’re having. Two, we forget that Mikey likes spicy.


Our philosophy has been to try to have healthy food around the house, and when he shows an interest in any of it, we share it with him. Because man cannot live on brown rice alone, some not-so-good food sometimes slips into the house. I have a particular weakness for Tim’s Jalapeño Potato Chips, and catching me nibbling, Mikey asked for one, “Pease!”

“No, they’re spicy.”

“Picy chips, pease.”

“Very spicy,” I warned. As I’ve said before, I am a sucker for “pease.”

“Very picy chips, pease.”

When Mikey shows an interest in a rosebush, we take his hand and show him very, very gently that the thorns are “sharp,” so he understands what that means. I figured it was the same thing with the spicy chip. I gave him the smallest bit of a chip, and he ate it.

“Water pease,” he said, eyes wide.

I gave him a cup of water, and he drank it. A moment later:

“Mo picy chip, pease.”

At Senor Fred’s on Ventura, before we could stop him, he put a spoonful of salsa in his mouth. “Picy!”

At a party at friend’s where a celebrated Thai chef was showcasing her chili dipping sauces, we stupidly plunked Mikey right down on the counter next to the hottest one, and a moment later, his eyes were watering and his tongue was hanging out, “Picy!”

Yes, it’s important that his food is healthy, and his manners are good, but we like that Mikey dislikes bland food and wants big flavors. That’s what we call, in both senses of the phrase, having good taste.

Melmo!

My mother-in-law Carolyn tells the story of her father Charles going to the store with his grandson, my partner, Ted, when he was a toddler. Ted began screaming for something, and wouldn’t let up, and frustrated, Charles brought him back home and told Carolyn about it. “What would you do?” Charles asked her.

“I’d just give him the goddamn thing,” Carolyn replied.

That more or less sums up Ted’s parents philosophy on dealing with a toddler, and by extension, ours. You can and should certainly say no sometimes, but you pick your battles. Thus, when we were at Target recently, and Mikey saw a box of these organic yogurt rice crispy bars from Earth’s Best, we thought, “Sure, could be worse,” and we gave them to him.

Needless to say, it wasn’t the organicness that attracted Mikey, or the calcium or brown rice grain, or event the vanilla flavor. It was the image of the Sesame Street star Elmo, or “Melmo” as Mikey calls him, on the box. The insidiousness of fictional character promotion. There is no doubt of Mikey and Melmo which one is the puppet.

Much like the monster of Dr. Frankenstein came to be called Frankenstein himself, the organic yogurt rice crisp bars have become known as “Melmo” in our house. I don’t know why “organic yogurt rice crisp bars” isn’t as catchy, but that’s the way it is. And Melmo, I must tell you, is toddler crack.

On the plus side, there is nothing that Mikey won’t do for the promise of a Melmo. He could be in the middle of the biggest snit, and we murmur, “If you have a bath, change your clothes, comb your hair, and pick out a book for bedtime, then you can have a Melmo,” and he will rush to the bathroom, ripping off his clothes. On the minus side, the minute he is finished devouring the last delectable morsel of Melmo, the next two words out of his mouth: “More Melmo!”

We are experimenting with giving him half Melmos with mixed results. There may need to be an intervention.

On A Roll

The Sprog has been eating pretty healthily recently, but there’s always the danger of getting into a routine and not branching out to new cuisines. We’ve given him tastes of different regional fare, but we’ve been holding off on Japanese. We love sushi, but we know The Sprog’s immune system isn’t quite up to dealing with raw fish. We also know that he is far too antsy for the most formal of restaurants, but that’s part of what this blog is about: helping develop a tot’s good food habits all around, including in restaurants.

For lunch, we were going to go to IHOP. True confession, I’ve never been. The whole notion of going out for breakfast has always seemed a little strange to me. I know enough to know that it is the least formal meal at the least formal of restaurants, so we figured today being Saturday, we’d take him out and expand his horizons. We missed IHOP on Reseda Blvd., and since we were going to the mall in Northridge anyhow, we decided to go to the nearby restaurant chain, Marie Callenders.

It was terrible. I couldn’t eat my omelette hardly at all, and Ted, who can eat anything, only ate a bit of his frittata. The Sprog, on the other hand, gorged. Most of the blueberry muffins brought to our table went down his gullet. A pancake. Six or seven slices of melons. Some of Ted’s egg, potato, bacon, and sausage frittata, and the bite or two I could bear to give him of my omelette, plus some hash browns. He was a gut bucket.

He also behaved beautifully. After we arrived and before the food arrived, I took him out on the lawn for a walk around to burn off some energy, and he flipped back and forth between my side of the table and Ted’s, but he was in great form. Inspired by that, we decided that for dinner, we’d take him to our favorite sushi dive, Akari Sushi in Woodland Hills.

We got there at six thirty, and there were a couple people inside, but not many. Perfect. We settled him in and he devoured his edamame. Score. We tried feeding him that before and he didn’t go for it. Now he ate plate after plate. Avoiding the raw fish temptation, we ordered baked crab roll, spider roll, and hamachi kama, which is baked yellowtail collar, one of our favorites. The Sprog ate it all, and was given a pair of “Chinese chopsticks” to practice with. He broke two pairs, so he ended with regular ones.

He gave the waitress high-fives, fist bumps, and kisses.

“Come back next week!” she called after us as we left. We would, but next week is The Sprog’s 2nd birthday, and we have plans – some of which involve food.

Smear Campaign

I’m British, and while there are plenty of quite outdated jokes about British cuisine from the days before Nigella Lawson, Gordon Ramsay, and Heston Blumenthal made it delicious and chic, there are still some controversial culinary traditions. In addition to teaching our son to love fresh, healthy food and have excellent dining room manners, I want to him to know and perhaps enjoy the food of his British heritage. Today, I came home earlier from work, hungry because I hadn’t had any lunch. I made myself a slice of bread, butter, and Marmite and came out to the backyard where my partner and the Sprog were playing.

“Please,” said the Sprog, eyeing my bread.

“I don’t know if you’re going to like it,” I said, giving him a small chunk. I am unable to resist a “Please.”

He woofed it down. A moment later, his hand came up again. “Please?”

So that was it. Two small morsels of bread, butter, and Marmite, and then I said “All gone,” and he agreed, “Ga ga.”

For those not familiar, Marmite is a by-product of beer brewing. It is very salty and yeasty, and the slogan for the company has been “Love It or Hate It” – which is not something most brands would embrace. Here in Los Angeles, it is available at a couple specialty British shops, but I try to pick some of it up when I’m in the UK, and I ask my friends visiting to bring some back for me. One friend arrived with a jar of it, and told me that he was asked at customs, “Have you brought over any food, or Marmite?”

Nutritionally, sodium content is quite high, not surprisingly, but so is Niacin, Folic Acid, and Vitamin B12, even in the tiniest 2 gram smear on a piece of bread. The amount the Sprog had was negligible.

The point of giving my son Marmite is not the nutrition, though it used to be advertised as “the growing up spread” because it was a way to get children their B vitamins. Looking at the label of ingredients, it is good stuff, which is welcome after I took a moment to read the label of the YoBaby yogurt I had been feeding him and seeing that the second ingredient was sugar (I have since switched to Greek yogurt with fruit, which he seems to like as well or better anyhow).

No, the point of giving my son Marmite is sharing something with him that I love. That’s as nourishing as any vitamins and minerals.

Now I have to go look up my other childhood favorites, Heinz Apricot Rice Pudding and Farley’s Rusks, and see whether they’re as good as I remember.

Pasta & Peas, and Leeks & Please

Today, the Sprog had a playdate with an older woman (7 years old) and her mother who made him broccoli-stuffed ravioli, which he devoured. It was his first pasta, and it was very good – turns out it’s an Italian brand called Garafalo she got at Costco.

She also gave him lots of her famous croutons, which made him happily stink of garlic.

We’re trying to all eat the same things for dinner, and eliminate the distinctions between food for kids and food for grown-ups. Tonight it was roast chicken, mashed potatoes with burrata mozzarella, and pureed peas and leeks. Everything except the chicken was new to him, and he loved it, though he didn’t quite finish the peas and leeks. Still, it’s good that green isn’t an automatic turn-off to him anymore.

I haven’t mentioned this before, but a couple points on manners: we tell him whenever he reaches for something, he has to say “Please” first. It’s become a comical elongated “Peeeeeee-eeeeease” with giggles. At least fifty percent of the time, we get a thank you or its equivalent (“Dank doo,” “Eeep oh,” “Zzzxhmqt!”) as well. And the moment he starts to play with his food rather than eat it, it gets taken away, only to be returned with more Peeeeeee-eeeeeases and Dank doos.

After all, in less than a month, he’s meeting Grandma and the manners better be spot on.

Some of the Good Stuff

Some things the Sprog has had over the weekend and today:
• Salmon
• Pizza crust
• Explorateur Cheese

• Quiche (he picked the spinach out)
• Mushrooms
• Crepe
• Yam
• Oven-roasted kale

From The Mouths Of Babes

Now that we have the Sprog used to eating some green things like his spirulina-infused oatmeal, we are moving on to others. Last night, with his sausage, chicken, and eggs, we gave him pureed spinach with cous-cous and his favorite hummus. (I know, we did hummus with quesadilla, and now we’re doing it with cous-cous – it’s early fusion cuisine.) It went down the gullet in no time.

He still loves blueberries, and today after breakfast (eggs, toast, blueberries and strawberries), I gave him a couple blueberries in a snack cup. He disappeared into his nursery and we heard soft babbling baby talk. Peering around the corner, we saw him feeding the blueberries to Woof-Woof, the stuffed dog he sleeps with every night. He was doing all the things we do to him, saying “Whee!” and “Yum yum!” as he pushed the berries into the sewed up mouth.

In more ways that one, from the mouths of babes.

Sneaky Greens

The Sprog is always starving at breakfast time and has eaten everything – pancakes, oatmeal, Weetabix cereal – we’ve put in front of him. Today, I made him his traditional “super” Weetabix, thick enough to stick on his uncertain spoon, with milk, protein powder, and brewer’s yeast, and added a teaspoon of powdered spirulina which is rich in amino acids and beta-kerotene. We were a little concerned that he would be put off by his cereal being a very vivid green color, but he woofed it down as usual.



For dinner, I made a quesadilla where pureed broccoli was hidden between the layers of cheese and tortilla, and he could dip it in hummus, his favorite sauce (where we have hidden spirulina before, by the way). He never drinks juice during the day, only water and milk with breakfast, but I made an exception tonight and gave him a glass of Naked “Green Machine” juice in his sippy cup and he loved it. I suppose I could have juiced apples, bananas, kiwi, mango, pineapple, together with spirulina, chlorella, broccoli, spinach, garlic, barley grass, wheat grass, ginger, and parsley, but sometimes a little convenience is nice.

Also introduced him to blueberries to go with his much-loved dessert of sliced strawberries. The bowl was cleaned out.

Let The Feeding Begin

My partner and I started this blog almost a year ago, when it looked like we’d be getting 11-month-old twins to foster and (we hoped) adopt. That fell through, and then six months later, we began fostering a 5-month-old baby. He ended up leaving us after a month, breaking our hearts. A few more months went by, and we were given a 21-month-old boy but again, he was moved to another foster home after only a week and a half. 24 hours after losing him, we opened our doors to a new child, a 20-month-old toddler. My partner Ted has blogged in some detail about all this in his blog tedpeterson.blogspot.com.

This brief history is to say that we have gone from having no children and no reason to blog about the feeding of them, to being busy with three different little boys at different times, and no time to blog. Now that we’re getting a handle on it, I wanted to revisit this blog and start contributing to it regularly.

“Baby J,” as we call the 5-month-old in the public world of cyberspace, didn’t have a very demanding diet. We gave him formula and occasionally a bottle of water. “Baby A,” as we called the 21-month-old was a real gut-bucket. When we took him to the pediatrician, he was weighed in at the 75th percentile for his weight even though he was only in the 40th percentile for height. Not an obese child, yet, but certainly a little porker. He would eat everything we put in front of him, devouring broccoli, squash, tofu, everything that wasn’t moving.

“Baby M,” the 20-month-old in our care now, who we fully expect to adopt in 6 months time, is a normal toddler. He’s exactly in the 50th percentile for weight, and 50th for height, so the foster home that had him before didn’t overfeed him, which is good. And his appetite is hardy: he asks for food (“More! More!”) a lot in between meals. There is a lot he does eat, and a few things, mainly vegetables, that he tries and then spits up.

Our theory is that it’s a textural thing. I served him steamed squash in little cubes and he did the spit up thing. So I took it away, and came back it mashed up with carrots, and he tried it again and spit it up. So I took it away, and blended the carrots and squash in with yogurt. He scraped the bowl clean.

I love the fact that he always tries.

I don’t know what he was used to eating at the old foster home. “Baby A,” I know, was used to eating a lot of junk, as evidenced by his reaction in line at the candy shelves we passed in the grocery store and the fit he had when he didn’t get any of it. We haven’t had that same reaction from M. But we know one thing about toddlers: they are always unpredictable.

Figuring out what works and doesn’t work is the purpose of this blog. Input from parents who have faced the challenges of the dinner table, from menus to manners, would be greatly appreciated.

Taste Budding

My name is Ian, and I am an Englishman living in Los Angeles. Sometime in the next month or two, my partner and I expect to become parents, and we will almost certainly need to feed our children. I was a food science major in college and am known as a foodie and a cook among my friends. I do most of the cooking at home, and don't anticipate that changing when I'm a dad. What's going to be interesting to me - and hopefully, to you too - is the process of making good, healthy, balanced food for our babies, and watching as their taste buds develop. Thus, the title of this blog: taste budding.

I've read a number of books on the subject of the nutritional requirements of children, and am intrigued by the position of certain experts such as Dr William Sears who suggest that during the first three years, you can train a palate to reject overly sugary, overly processed junk food. I don't know going into this what other challenges I'll face - allergies, pickiness, messiness, et cetera - but it promises to be an adventure.