When my wife, Laurie, told me that she was pregnant, I was working the world’s greatest job: restaurant critic for a daily news paper. Every week I’d be off to some new or neglected restaurant — a dim sum parlor, a Korean hole in the wall, a red sauce Italian joint, a Turkish kebab house — all paid for by the Seattle Times. Laurie would usually come along, and we’d feast on great food, miserable food, and a lot in between. On nights off from restaurant reviewing I’d cook dinner: green papaya salad with tiny dried shrimp, beef bourguignon, Brussels sprouts with bacon.
So when I learned we were going to have a baby, my first thought was Are we going to have to eat fifties rejects like sloppy joes for the next eighteen years? Or feed our kid food we’d never eat ourselves? (Okay, my actual first thought was Jeez, I hope it was one of the better sperm.) All I knew about baby food was that it came in a jar and looked liked washed-out fingerpaints. And I could barely remember anything I ate when I was a kid beyond pepperoni pizza, burgers, steak, and roast chicken. I hated roast chicken. In sixth grade, a friend and I vowed never to eat foods other than pizza, burgers, and hot dogs — in retrospect, something of a drawn-out suicide pact.
Now, I still like pizza, burgers, and hot dogs, and I’ve even kind of come around on roast chicken, especially the poulet rôti served at Le Pichet near Pike Place Market. But, pact or no pact, I didn’t want to be trapped into eating them in rotation, out of some sense of family solidarity, until our child left for college.
The words of John Allemang rang out in my head: “You don’t have children?” writes Allemang in The Importance of Lunch. “You will never know what kind of gastronomic compromises you’ve been spared. Children don’t just bring a jolt of reality to adult appetites. They remake reality, turning a sophisticated cook who used to smoke her own duck sausages into a desperado who will stop at nothing — not even packaged luncheon meat — to silence the complaints of the young.”
I thought about the day my friend Matt and I spent making two kinds of Thai sausage, one with sticky rice and garlic (sai krok), the other with lemongrass, galangal, and chiles (sai oua). Those days are over, pal, Allemang seemed to be saying. And that doesn’t only apply to sausage. Another friend had always emailed me MP3s of new bands I just had to listen to, until he had twins. “I just don’t have time to keep track of music anymore,” he confessed, and his bulletins abruptly stopped.
Not to spoil the ending of this book, but Allemang was wrong: Iris and I have spent plenty of time together making sausage. She’ll drop any toy to run over and help me operate the meat grinder. He was also right: Iris takes supermarket deli ham to school in her lunch box at least once a week.
After Iris was born, I read a lot of books about feeding babies and young children. Most of them were vegetable-puree cookbooks, party food books (of the “English muffin pizzas that look like cat faces” variety), and dull, clinical books that read like a free pamphlet from the pediatrician’s office. What I wanted were stories about real parents and real kids learning about food together — making discoveries, making mistakes, making cookies.
So I wrote my own. Hungry Monkey is the book I wish someone had handed me before Iris was born so I would have known that breastfeeding is challenging (even for dads), that there are two simple rules to take a lot of the stress out of feeding kids, and that it’s okay to feed a baby sushi and spicy enchiladas. Most important, I would have been reassured that having kids doesn’t require dumbing down your menu: if you love to eat, a new baby presents an opportunity to have more fun with food than ever before in your life.
And, yes, more frustration.
Laurie and I were married for eight years before having a baby, and I sometimes wonder what exactly we were doing all that time. Not like, “How could we have waited so long?” I have no regrets about that. No, I mean, now we spend hours and hours every day looking after Iris — what did we do with those scads of free time for eight years? It seems like we should have been able to score a couple of Nobel Prizes, or at least build a huge, eccentric art installation.
Instead, we have a small, eccentric child. In most ways, Iris eats like a typical four-year-old. She prefers white food, takes her burger plain, and is skeptical of vegetables. But she’s also picky about certain things that are clearly a result of her parents’ food obsessions. One day I burst into Iris’s room in the morning and said, “How would you like some pancakes and bacon?”
“Nueske’s,” said Iris. Nueske’s is a very smoky and expensive artisan bacon from Wisconsin, which we don’t always keep in stock, so I attempted to substitute the supermarket brand without telling her. At breakfast, Iris ate a whole pancake and nibbled two bites of bacon. “Dada, this bacon doesn’t taste good,” she said.
Later she made up a game called I’m Takin’ Your Bacon, in which I sidle down the hall and she runs up behind me and snatches my imaginary bacon. “I know!” said Iris, grabbing her toy pirate ship. “We’re playing I’m Takin’ Your Bacon, level two: I’m Divin’ Your Bacon Underwater.”
Iris may be more of a bacon snob than I am, but I think we have the same overall philosophy about food:
Food is fun, and you get to enjoy it three times a day, plus snacks.
Hey, you do have to eat quite often, and food at its best can be enormously rewarding. With a little luck and a healthy...