This time, I asked my son if he wanted to help. He said yes immediately, which is how I learned that “helping” meant standing next to me at the stove and auditing every single decision I made about the chicken.
He didn’t stir. He didn’t shred. He watched. He asked why I was doing it that way. He asked if it was ready yet - four times before the pan was even hot. He inspected the chicken with the focus of someone who has been burned before, which, fair enough, he’s seven and he has. When I seasoned it he leaned in close to see what I was adding. Not enough pepper, he said. Our Peppermaster added some more.
He did not help make the enchiladas. He did oversee the entire production with an authority I found both annoying and privately a little impressive.
We sat down to eat.
My son ate his enchilada the way he approaches most things he has decided he likes: immediately, completely, and with total disregard for any collateral damage to the surrounding table. He had sauce skid-marks on his face before I’d finished sitting down. He didn’t notice. He asked for another one before he’d finished the first, while still chewing, with the urgency of a man who is not entirely sure the supply is secure.
I told him to finish what he had first.
He did. Then he asked again, very politely. He ate two and a half enchiladas.
My daughter, meanwhile, was engaged in her own process. She had opened her enchilada - not torn it, opened it, the way you’d open a letter you wanted to read carefully - and was systematically removing the corn from the filling. Piece by piece, using her fork and knife. No obvious frustration. No commentary. Just steady, deliberate corn extraction, set on a napkin, the rest of the enchilada waiting patiently on her plate.
I asked what she was doing.
She said she didn’t want corn inside. Also, she didn’t like cooked corn.
What she did next I was not prepared for. She got up, went to the kitchen, came back with the container of fried corn kernels I keep around for snacking (and the veggie burgers), and added them to the top of her enchilada. By the handful. Multiple handfuls. The enchilada was now under more corn than it started with, but apparently the outside was different from the inside in some way I’m choosing not to interrogate.
She ate the whole thing. Then she put a few more kernels on the remaining sauce and ate those too.
My son’s response to all of this was chewing. Loud, committed, fully occupied chewing. He didn’t look up.
My daughter, once finished with her enchilada, said: “I want rice with no lemon in it.”
The rice had lime in it. She had watched me squeeze it in. She was standing right there when I did it, close enough that she could have intervened, and she said nothing. She waited until she was sitting at the table with an enchilada in front of her to register her feelings about the citrus situation.
I didn’t correct her on the lemon. I just made a note of it and moved on, as one does.
Last time I made chicken enchiladas, there were complaints before anyone had touched them - about the shape, the concept, the fact that the chicken was inside something instead of just sitting on a plate like a civilized piece of protein. My son looked at his plate the way a customs officer looks at an unaccompanied bag.
This time: no complaints. Just my son asking me to please hurry up, my daughter arriving at the table with a corn redistribution plan I wasn’t aware she’d made, and a formal objection to lemon that was actually lime, filed well after the relevant decision had been made.
I’ll take it. I’m writing it down.