My daughter requested “noodles like the dumplings that you made once” for dinner.
It took a few minutes of back and forth before I understood what she meant. Not dumplings. Not the noodles I make with dumplings. She meant the stir fry I’d attempted a few weeks ago - the one where I’d used noodles as the base. The dumplings, apparently, meant the dish that was similar to one she had at our favorite Dim Sum restaurant one evening and had since become part of the memory of the dish in a way that was entirely inaccurate but also completely her.
I’ll take it. She was asking for stir fry. I started cooking.
I thought I’d forgotten to buy the pre-prepped vegetable kit, so I chopped onions and zucchini. Then I found the kit in the back of the fridge, still good. So the stir fry got everything - the kit, the onions, the zucchini, some mushrooms I had around. My son helped stir. He asked if he could try flipping things in the wok and I said yes, which resulted in a mess that took a few minutes to clean up and which he found delightful. Worth it.
We sat down to eat.
My daughter immediately began the process of separating every vegetable from her noodles with the focus of someone defusing an explosive. My son, on the other hand, wanted only the vegetables - specifically the onions and mushrooms - and pushed the noodles aside with considerably less care than his sister was using. All around his plate were noodles, laying fallen on the table like sticky soldiers.
They had, between the two of them, eaten one complete stir fry.
I asked them both to try the zucchini. This was met with the usual faces. The inspecting, the prodding, the expression of someone being asked to do something deeply unreasonable. I waited.
They both took a bite.
My daughter chewed, thought about it, and said: “I think I actually like this. But it feels like it will make me full, and I don’t want to be full.”
My son chewed, thought about it, and said: “I didn’t think I liked this, but I do like it. I like the onion better though. Or the mushrooms. But this is good.”
I nearly fell out of my seat. I have been doing this for months. Months of strategies and charts and blenders and cookie cutters and sticker rewards and one very long, difficult conversation with a fork. And tonight, on a Thursday, because she wanted noodles like the dumplings that time, they both tried something new and liked it.
My wife was not home for dinner. This keeps happening.
After first servings, they both wanted more. They asked to dish their own portions, which I agreed to without hesitation on the grounds that they were eating. Then my son looked up and said “I want to play Musical Bites.”
My daughter: “Yeah! Musical Bites!”
The phone came out. 6% battery. Why not? They picked a playlist. At their request I set the time between bites to be very short, so it was a fast cacophony of music, eating, forks clanging as they refilled them, and repeat.
I would have paid them. I would have paid actual money for this dinner to happen. They played Musical Bites and ate noodles until the battery on my phone died.
When my son had finished his second serving, he looked at me very seriously and said “Pwease can I have the salsa you made, daddy. Pwease.”
Regular readers will know about the salsa. Specifically, they will know that my son has been eating it by the ladle. I said yes. He was happy. My daughter, true to form, said “nothing else for me daddy, I don’t want to get full.”
It was a good dinner. I’m writing it down before I forget how it felt, because these posts are usually about what didn’t work, and I want to remember that sometimes, without warning, on an ordinary Thursday, it does.