People talk about dinner like it’s the hard meal. I understand why. Dinner is where you’re trying to introduce things, balance nutrition, get a vegetable near someone who treats vegetables as a personal slight. It gets all the attention in the picky eating conversation.
But dinner in this house has rules I’ve at least mapped. I know the terrain. Breakfast, on the other hand, operates on a logic I am still actively trying to understand, and every time I think I have it, someone adds a new constraint.
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My daughter will only eat eggs one way. Solid whites, runny yolk. My wife calls this a dippy egg, which is where the term came from, and my daughter has adopted it completely - “yellow circle with the dippy.” This is the egg. There is no other egg. If the yolk breaks during cooking, we don’t talk about it out loud but everyone knows.
The dippy, I should clarify, is not for dipping. It is a descriptor. A textural promise. We made the mistake a couple of times of suggesting she try dipping her toast in it, the way you’re supposed to, the way the name implies. She was offended in the way only a five-year-old can be offended.
My son will only eat what he calls butter eggs. These are soft scrambled eggs made with a small amount of butter in the pan - which is just how I make scrambled eggs. At some point we tried calling them scrambled eggs. He informed us he doesn’t like scrambled eggs. He likes the eggs dad makes with the butter. These are the same eggs. He has simply drawn a brand distinction to protect something he enjoys from a category he’s decided is beneath him, and there is no argument available to us that he will accept, so we don’t make one anymore. He gets butter eggs. I get to keep making the same eggs.
Toast is not served to my son. Not because we’ve made a rule about it - because the one time we put a piece on his plate he reacted as if it was something we’d done to harm him intentionally. We learned.
My daughter gets a bagel. We have learned to save the bottom for her, after several incidents involving the top half and the thirty-minute seed-scraping process that follows, which ends with a cold, partially descaled bagel she won’t eat anyway. The bottom has fewer seeds by geometry, enough fewer that she finds it acceptable, and we have all silently agreed to simply make sure she gets it. The bagel gets cream cheese first, then strawberry jelly. In that order.
We also went through a potato phase. Several potato phases, really. Hash browns, home fries, smashed potatoes, little potato pucks (wife and I loved these, kids looked at us like we were aliens), various attempts to find a format that worked. My son wanted nothing to do with any of them. My daughter went through a period of really liking shredded hash browns, then suddenly not liking them, while still requiring them on her plate before she’d eat anything else. She wouldn’t eat the potatoes. She just needed to know they were there. Her emotional support starch.
I have gotten very good at making two types of eggs. First the dippy egg for my daughter, because she doesn’t want it hot anyway, and because that egg cleans out of the pan easily to make the “butter eggs” after. It’s a system. It works.
Breakfast is not the easy meal. I just used to think it was because I hadn’t been paying close enough attention.