Picky kids

As anyone who has been around kids very much can tell you sometimes kids are a little picky. I am lucky that my kids aren't incredibly picky . . . well for the most part.

Daisy's current list of dislikes are:

• corn dogs with mustard(that's easy to avoid)
• spicy hot food, ditto
• raw tomatoes
• raw onions
• nuts, a little harder to avoid
• sour cream, she doesn't mind it mixed in, just not glopped on

Junior on the other hand had an ever growing list of food dislikes. To be honest most of them we ignore because otherwise all we would eat as a family is cereal. A current approximation (I know we have missed some) contains (in the order we thought of them):

• onion, raw and cooked-- SHHH! most of my cooking starts with onions
• cooked tomatoes, (puh-leeze he could eat his weight in raw tomato)
• spicy food, this one I give in on
• mushrooms, we don't eat them often and don't tell him when it is in the food. If he can't see it, he doesn't notice.
• coconut, (this is a new one to me)
• mustard, we do mostly avoid it anyway
• mayo, I don't use it much in cooking but he wouldn't notice it
  
• french fries, Seriously, was he switched at birth?
• green apples, he keeps insisting he likes red delicious but on the rare occasion I buy them he won't eat one because it "doesn't taste good"
• he is not real big on meat, so typically whatever meat we are having we hear "I hate . . . " -- but he still has to eat some
• pickles, this one is easy to avoid
• black pepper, he just can't see it
• sour cream - just its existance bugs him
  
• hot dogs -- I don't like them either so this one isn't a big deal.
• black olives, this just leaves more for the rest of us

All of this reminds me of a point I wanted to make. There are two types of people those who like (or tolerate) marshmallows on sweet potatoes and normal people those who don't.

I honestly thought I didn't like sweet potatoes until I made them mashed. See I had a rule for myself I wouldn't feed my kids anything I wouldn't eat myself when they were babies. So when I made a sweet potato for Daisy (boiled and mashed) I tasted it and it was good.

So now I use sweet potatoes alot, but I still don't like them with marshmallows.

I have a theory that there are many others who "don't like sweet potatoes" because they have only tried them "candied." I know there are many who don't like it with marshmallows.

The difficulty is when you live in a divided household. My mostly wonderful husband insist that it's not Thanksgiving or Christmas without candied yams. I think they are disgusting. So each year we have 2 types of sweet potatoes, with and without. But HE has to cook the with - or have his mom do it.