Please. Just. Eat.
It was raining babies in Rome. My husband and I left New York City, applied our Type A personalities to parenthood, and had three children in four years. Barely settled as expats in Italy, we had no support team, no nearby parents or aunties. It was a blurry haze of diapers, sweet snuggles, and more than our fair share of spit up. I didn’t learn to speak Italian very well, but I did learn to cook.
Thankfully, one of those skills changed our lives.
It was a surprisingly easy decision to move to Italy. After dating on and off for a handful of years, Paul and I finally got engaged on Memorial Day weekend. Making up for lost time, we were married on Labor Day at the 5th Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. During our engagement, his company offered Paul a position in London and we both snapped at the chance. A die hard Anglophile, living in London was my long-time dream.
But things weren’t lining up right. The apartment we picked fell through. The company was in flux. And while we considered whether the English adventure would slip through our fingers, Paul got a phone call from an old friend. Dan and his wife, Amy, had been living in Rome for years, where Dan worked as an accountant at an agency of the United Nations, the Food and Agricultural Organization. He offered Paul the perfect four-year finance project. He also planned to recruit two more old pals from their bachelor days together at Ernst & Young. I cheered. “It’ll be more of an adventure!” And off we went.
We searched for apartments and eventually saw more than twenty. We took language lessons for twelve weeks. We imported my golden retriever and started a family. But after all the travel, through the crash course in culture and language, imagine my surprise to arrive in Italy and have the biggest question come from my own kitchen. What am I going to feed these kids every day?
Finding your footing as a parent and learning to cook (even in your country of origin), are two skills most of us aren’t prepared for. No wonder it feels so hard.
Food is so confusing. Cooking at home can be expensive, finicky, and time-consuming. What’s considered “healthy” changes all the time and kids only want to eat Goldfish anyway. How does anyone feed a family well, without losing their minds?
One of my biggest dreams for our family has always been raising kids who love good food. Good food, shared with people. I’ve craved beautiful family dinners, picturing a farmhouse table positively groaning with crisp white platters of golden roasted chicken, glistening vegetables with just the right amount of caramelization on the edges. We’d be happy faces passing plates with knowing smiles and inside jokes.
But there were problems from the start: I didn’t know how to cook and my toddlers wouldn’t always eat what I put in front of them.
The truth is, everyone’s kids are picky. And mine were no different.
So I learned. I took classes. I read books. I finally watched more Food Network than Bravo. I’m serving up my best takeaways from ten years in the kitchen. Eating meals with kids doesn’t have to be miserable; these simple steps will help every family find greater peace, healthier habits and, maybe, more joy around the table.
In the posts that follow, I’ll share how to:
- translate adult recipes into something babies can eat
- simplify recipes
- add more healthy ingredients
- create lighter versions of even the most decadent dishes
- plan meals like you’re not in grocery jail
- make it all something any parent can pull off on a busy weeknight, even when serving knee-high critics
These tips are immediately applicable and swap kitchen confusion for a calmer, more peaceful experience.
But at the core of this series are the strategies.
That’s right, you’ll get plenty of tips and recipes, but it’s the key strategies that will transform the picky eaters around your table into foodlets who exclaim, “Yes, P-L-E-A-S-E!”
You’ll get every single story, statistic and secret I’ve ever found useful.
Now let’s feed some kids.
The post Welcome to Italy. And Parenthood. (Picky Part 2) appeared first on Foodlets.