Food Blog (Rough, very rough, very very rough)

Mathew Hajek

ENG 121-013

10-2-10

Food Blog (Rough)

I have never had a problem with my daughters being picky eaters, I mean yeah the both of them refuse onions or mushrooms, though that’s pretty much the limit of what they wont eat. How would you like for your children to beg for broccoli every day, raid the fridge and eat all the carrots and ginger root, pick all the cucumbers and eat them before you have a chance to get some, or eat squash like it were going out of style.

Now maybe I should clarify the ‘anything’ that Shiori and Kiya will eat. My daughters will not drink soda, not because I said they cant, because when offered some by my brother they were physically repulsed by it and spat it right out. The girls will pick at and not eat processed foods when they stay the night at my Moms house. My babies go trick or treating for the fun of it and then give their candy away while telling other kids “candy yucky, candy hurt”.

Perhaps this is because I do not short order cook anything, perhaps this is because just about everything we eat is home made from scratch using only whole food ingredients, perhaps this is because I do not allow any kind of processed sugar or candy or soda in my house, in my body and most certainly not in their bodies. (In context, I have hundreds of pounds of candy in my office for my vending machines, though my office is my office where I work, not where I live so the candy really is not in my house.) I would venture to guess that all of these reasons bear significant weight when it comes to why my babies are such good eaters, after all it is the addiction to sugar and an overgrowth of candida yeast in the body that cause most of our (as humans) disliking and even repulsion of whole foods and healthy alkaline diets (fear of green things).

I think though, the real reason why my girls will eat just about anything is I did not, and do not, treat them like fragile little children, I treat them like humans who happen to be smaller than me. That is to say when I have conversations with them, I speak to them as I speak to adults, when I play with them I take care not to be brutally rough and still I ‘bring it on’, when I renovate houses I bring them along and give them paint brushes to go nuts with, when I garden I bring them with and teach them about the earth and the creatures whom we live with and why prayer and meditation are so integral to our well being and place on this Earth. When we eat I do not anticipate little taste buds not liking something foreign and I do not beg them to try it, instead what we have is what we have and I believe my daughters learned from day one that the world is full of flavor and each flavor is distinctly its own, each flavor is more magical than the last, and each flavor has power and meaning in every little bite. Two of the first solid foods I remember Shiori eating are genuine Jalapeno and Anaheim salsa, and curried rice noodles with carrots, cucumber, tomato, and grilled chicken (A.K.A. real sweet and sour chicken).

There is this wonderful little Thai restaurant close to my house simply called ‘Pad Thai’ which is located in the Mission Trace Shopping Center at Wadsworth and Highway 285. If you are faint of taste or cannot handle flavor, I would not suggest this place to you. If your Idea of quality Thai cuisine is those overly vinegary dollar a scoop places, you shouldn’t eat here. If your expectations are for it to be like going to ‘Tuk Tuk’ you will be sorely disappointed. Now if you like trying new things or like truly authentic Thai food, then I invite you to take a little journey with me. Never you mind that this little restaurant placed in the top 100 Thai restaurants in the U. S. and is rated the number one in Colorado, the family that owns and runs the place has to be the most wonderful and giving people I’ve met.

Imagine you are three years old again your favorite auntie has just brought you a wonderful desert new dish to try; you haven’t even finished stuffing your face with garlic pepper chicken. Imagine sweet and creamy whole coconut milk with a mellow undertone of mushroomy black beans, plantain bananas wrapped in rice and grilled to perfection, tantalize your taste buds with mango and deglazed garlic and curry sauce. Now imagine these are not available on any menu, rather you get these because your auntie loves you so much. That’s just a bit of what Shiori and Kiya eat when we do go out. No the restaurant owner is not their auntie. Rather in our family anyone whom we spend time with and know on a personal level is our family, that is to say we have a very large family. (Takes a village to raise a child/takes a village to build a society kind of mentality).

I remember growing up at my babysitters house, my mom was never around and my grandmother, who raised me, obviously worked during the day and so I had to ‘Georgia’s house’, not that I minded any, she was such a wonderful lady. Georgia didn’t short order cook either, and everything she made (except for the occasional blue box macaroni) was made from scratch. Have you ever had roast lamb? Absolutely heavenly isn’t it? Have you ever had roast lamb where a whole lamb was stuck on a spit and roasted over a big fire pit dug into the ground?

Talk about growing up at Georgia’s house ‘my Greek babysitter’, and eating a heavily Mediterranean influenced diet, talk about having fresh carved lamb that had just been roasted on a spit over a fire pit no more than five minutes ago, talk about her world famous baklava (not to be confused with a balaklava).

Now come back and relate this to how you have made a deliberate effort to have Shiori and Kiya experience a very wide variety of foods and to love each food for its individual characteristics.

Now lets get into what we eat at home and why we eat what we eat.

Talk about not having a microwave and why we do not have one.

Authors Notes:

OK So I’m not feeling it with this essay and am close to shit canning it and starting over. The beginning comes off nicely, some mechanical tweaking and rewording for greater detail and engagement and I think it could work. The middle area where I epic fail at describing the Pad Thai restaurant and my childhood babysitters house, those may get the axe, I just don’t feel the flow.

Every time I go back over it, the content feels too forced, perhaps if I did go ahead with my argument idea for why “processed foods ARE KILLING YOU!” This did feel much more natural. To avoid becoming too preachy and technical I could keep the parts where I correlate it to my daughters Shiori and Kiya and how they are affected by our lifestyle.

I could throw in some context based on my own childhood growing up on mountain dew and skittles and TV dinners. I could give frame of reference to my brother who is 10 years old and 100 pounds over weight and eats nothing but candy and junk food all day and my mom cant seem to figure out why he’s so unhealthy, after all she did switch all the sugar in the house out for Splenda which is much safer for you to consume. I am being quasi facetious here, the reality is ALL artificial sweeteners are poisonous to the human condition, you really would be better off eating regular sugar then brushing your teeth afterwards.

On the vending machines: Call me a hypocrite of you want, the reality of the mater is, it doesn’t matter how much I preach to the people around me the value of proper nutrition. The mass majority of Americans are going to binge eat candy and other junk foods like they are going out of style, so it might as well be me who profits from those who choose to eat that shit. I do mean shit because that’s what it is, 100% pure pasteurized synthetically made and mass produced death in a colorful candy shell. ‘POINSONOUS SHIT’ going down the throat. And it tastes like SHIT too.