Well, I've finally done it. I've made our daughter throw-up due to my cooking. Nice, right? It went like this: we got home from church on Sunday and while Michael was talking to his parents on the phone, I was cooking up lunch for Emilia -- and it was something entirely new. We bought these glass noodles from Uwajimaya a month or so, intending to use them for an Ottolenghi recipe. However, that never happened, so I decided to quickly cook some of them up for the girl's lunch. Now, mind you, I've never cooked with glass noodles before, so I had no clue what I was doing. So, I treated them the same way I would regular spaghetti. Big mistake.
Once the noodles were cooked, I drained them, tossed them with a bit of olive oil, fresh tomato, and salt. And let me tell you, revolting does not do it justice. I couldn't even look at them, let alone eat them. I tried, but spit them out. And so, before tossing them in the trash, I asked Emilia (who was standing in the kitchen and at me looking like, 'why are you throwing away my lunch!') if she wanted to try them. To my astonishment, the girl said yes. I gave her a little bite, and she chewed, and she chewed, and then she started to look quite nauseous. Two seconds later she threw up on the kitchen floor. Michael was yelling, all mad-like, 'what did you feed her?!' 'Her lunch!' was all I could say before I started to laugh. Poor thing. I could hardly blame her -- after all, they made me sick just looking at them.
This incident aside, I tend to get quite annoyed when Emilia refuses my cooking. (She would have been smart to refuse it that particular time, though.) Dinner ends up so stressful when I spend the whole of it trying to cram healthy things into her little mouth. So when I decided to cook up Julia Child's recipe for Pipérade (which warrants another check-mark in my cookbook), I also cooked up some chicken for the girl, because otherwise I knew it would be a battle. Any sort of frittata/omelette/quiche/eggy-dish turns into way too much of a headache.
The pipérade was so good, though. The girl didn't know what she was missing -- well, apart from the bacon. She happily ate as much of that as I would put on her plate. It was also so easy to make -- perfect for an evening of putting up the Christmas tree and all that jazz.
