For reasons I can’t explain, I continue to engage in the masochistic exercise of “making dinner” every night, even though no one seems much interested except me and the dog.
“Don’t eat that – I’m making dinner,” I’ll tell my teenagers as I watch them haul a Everest-size armload of snacks out of the cupboards.
They look as me as if I’m speaking Vulcan, then walk off, still clutching all the snacks to their chests like a prize.
Why, you’re probably asking yourselves, don’t I just ban all snacks, period? Well, both my kids were neglected before I adopted them and didn’t have enough to eat.
I quickly realized that having tons of food in the house they could get any time they wanted made them feel safe.
Now that they’re teens, though, it’s gotten out of hand.
To keep my blood pressure in check, I’ve given up arguing with them over eating before dinner. But it invariably means that no one wants my culinary masterpieces when I’m actually done cooking.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Buddy the Wonder Dog never saw a meal he didn’t want. Yet another reason to have a dog instead of a child.
When the food is ready, I call my 16-year-old girl child in to eat. She will sometimes actually consume what I’ve cooked, as long as she didn’t just go to In-N-Out with her friends, and as long as none of the food is touching any other food on the plate.
Yeah. There’s that touching thing. Funny how she never minds the Oreo sprinkles touching the top of the ice cream sundae. But she won’t eat my delicious beef stew because the foods touch each other.
When my kids were little, they ate vegetables and salads without complaint. Well, OK, we mostly ate spinach and broccoli because those were their favorites, but they did eat them.
Nowadays, they just look at the green vegetable I’ve prepared as if it were an agricultural specimen under glass at the Natural History Museum.
“Here, have some spinach,” I’ll say, making moves to ladle it onto the teens’ plates next to the main course.
“Naw, I’ll eat some later,” they invariably reply. “Later” is their code word for “when pigs fly.” And even I’m not stupid enough to think my kid is going to eat broccoli for dessert.
Following the parenting-class advice to “pick your battles” with teenagers, I usually just shrug and point out that they’re jeopardizing their health.
But a few days ago, when Curly Girl again said she’d eat her salad “later,” I just snapped and shouted, “Put some salad on your plate now. I mean now! Now! Now!”
She looked at me as if I’d just told her she could never use her iPhone again, burst out crying, and bolted from the room. OK. I guess I didn’t handle that one so well.
This is a girl who would like to help people by giving blood, but the Red Cross won’t take her because her iron level is a smidgen too low. I keep pointing out that green veggies provide iron, especially spinach.
And she keeps insisted that In-N-Out burgers have plenty of iron as well.
I don’t know what teenagers do in other parts of the country, but in our neck of the woods, about one-third of teenagers’ annual calorie consumption comes from In-N-Out.
It’s a daily battle. “No, we’re not stopping at In-N-Out for dinner,” I insist, as we drive past one of three in our ‘hood. The teens persist.
They need In-N-Out, they argue. It’s healthy. The fries are made right in front of them.
“I don’t care if they cure heart disease – we’re not eating burgers three times a week,” I argue back. “Besides, I already thawed out a nice chicken for dinner.”
Even if I did want an In-N-Out burger – which occasionally I do – the lines of cars in the drive-in that stretch from here to New Mexico would be enough to deter me. Have you ever seen that line? Whew.
So we come home and the teens grab enough snacks to keep them from starving to death for an hour, until dinner is ready.
Then, they’ll declare that they really aren’t that hungry after all. And I’ll settle down for a nice, home-cooked meal, accompanied by the dog.
Luckily, he doesn’t mind if his food is touching.
Contact the writer: 714-796-7994 or mfisher@ocregister.com
