Pickle of the Litter

All of the charming and delightful company has made it pretty easy to sail through the first third of NaBloPoMo. Today I've kind of hit a wall. It was a great week-end though - today I drove around dropping off cheer-up biscuits and it was beautiful and sunny, and then I walked over to a friend's house for tea. Now it's dark and I'm alone because my husband is on his way to Denver and I wish I'd washed my hair earlier in the day and did I mention that it's dark? It feels very dark. So I'm going to go short and frivolous.

In one of San's recent posts, she mentioned that she doesn't really drink beer, and when told she would eventually like it if she kept drinking it, wondered why she would keep drinking something that doesn't taste good in the hopes of eventually liking it.

This makes perfect sense to me. And yet my daughter embarked on exactly this kind of quest in order to.... get herself to like pickles.

She didn't like pickles. Well and fine. She doesn't like a lot of things - she has texture issues, and I was a picky kid too, so I never pushed it. I don't see the sense of making kids eat stuff they don't like, even if it doesn't actually make them vomit (her day care provider insisted she try a three-bean casserole and that... did not go well). I presented a wide variety of things, and they had to taste them, and that was about it. I did staged prep (if we were having cooked vegetables I would just leave some raw, which is the way Eve prefers her vegetables to this day). I am a proponent of the theory that most people who say they'd never cater to a picky eater have never actually had one.

Ahem. Didn't mean to go on a rant there, clearly this is one of my hot button issues. Anyway. She didn't like pickles. Of all the things she didn't like, this seemed like one of the lowest-stakes things. I don't like olives. I mean, I really don't like them - my body doesn't recognize them as food. Same with Dijon mustard - if I get a sandwich that accidentally has Dijon I can't eat it. I'm okay with this. Well, ish - olives seem like something sophisticated people eat, and I would love to order a dirty martini and enjoy it. For the most part though, I'm just relieved to be an adult and not to have to eat anything I hate ever again. 

But for some reason, Eve was determined to be flavour-friends with pickles If she came down and I was making a sandwich and slicing a pickle, she would take a slice and eat it. And wince. 

Eventually she wanted pickles on her turkey sandwich every time. And now she'll make herself a plate of stuff and put a pickle on it. When I made a dill pickle pasta salad, she helped me chop the pickles and said "wait - we still have pickles though, right?" I asked her why she would basically do pickle calisthenics in order to make herself like something she didn't like, and she shrugged and said she saw something appealing in them and just had to practice. Practice pickle-eating.

She's so weird and I love her so much.

I also love this book. I like to think it's the culmination of the Cucumber Quest. Sorry, have I made it weird now?