Author Lela Nargi shares easy, fast recipes you can whip up with your child—for toddler meals with a gourmet feel. Reprinted from Mothering issue 135, March–April 2006. 7 pages. Digital Format.
EXCERPT
"My family is, admittedly, a bit food-obsessed. My own mother prepared nightly five-course dinners throughout my girlhood. I hoard ingredients from almost every cuisine imaginable and read cookbooks as if they were novels. It’s no wonder Ada’s second sentence was “I need a fork.” Her fifth, delivered to a waitress in a French restaurant, was “I’ll have the quiche.” But what I want her to take away from our lunch projects—aside from healthful and delicious meals—is not culinary snobbery or the idea that cooking must be exotic and complex. Rather, I want her to know what food is—not the processed, preflavored stuff that comes in boxes and cans. By food I mean fresh kale, squashes, mangoes, pears, tomatoes on the vine, whole fishes, rice in all shapes and lengths, and noodles of every variety: rice, mung bean, potato starch, buckwheat, thick and thin. I want her to know how food tastes: sour, bitter, perfumed, starchy, mushy, salty, sweet. . . ."
