When Dinner Isn’t a Total Loss

Babyman came home from daycare the other night totally keyed-up.  Maybe it was the music class they had this afternoon (his FAVORITE) or maybe it was the hundreds of fellow Giants fans he got to see making their way to the game (“Giants hat! Giants shirt! Lincecum! Hey, batter, batter!”), but he was going strong when he barrelled through the door demanding to “See it, mommy cook?”

This weekend my husband and I made one of our favorite, most luxurious meals: the Bruce Aidells-inspired matambre, which is a rolled flank steak stuffed with prosciutto and breadcrumbs and spinach and basil (oh, my!).  We had a boatload of leftovers so I figured what the heck; maybe it’s a way to sneak spinach into the kid, right?

Matambre seemed risky so I served it with surefire sweet potatoes (see previous post) and corn with butter, and bananas for good measure.  So what happened?  Well of course, he loved the matambre, and I may be scraping sweet potato out of the carpet for the rest of the week.  (Side note: the flinging of the sweet potato = dinnertime OVER, which is always kind of the bummer side of parenting.)

But here’s the thing: I don’t see dinner as a loss.  He only toyed with the corn, he rejected one of his favorite veggies altogether…but he also tried–and enjoyed!–something altogether new.

I guess the moral of the story is, parenthood is either a sequence of confounding defeats or tiny victories. I’m not going to be all Suzie Sunshine and pretend it’s always the latter for me, but hey, it’s summer after all.  Tonight I’m choosing to celebrate the victory.

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