A Culinary Mystery

I can't, for the life of me, figure out the reasoning behind the tastes of a child. Quite regularly, Gabe will turn his nose up at something, as if his tastes are too refined to possibly consider eating it. "Fish sticks, ewww!" he will declare after devouring six fish sticks not two days earlier.

And yet, from time to time, he will eat something utterly disgusting with the kind of gusto that should be reserved for the finest deserts (never mind the fact that we're talking about the same kid who will eat his lotion or scrape out the bottom of the sink and taste it as I've covered in previous posts).

An example of this last happened with dinner last night.

Let me explain what's on that plate. For dinner last night, I made him hot dogs, tater tots, and yogurt. No, the yogurt isn't the disgusting part of this picture. It's SUPPOSED to look like that. It's a "kids" yogurt with swirly colors--and it tastes as terrible as it looks, though Gabe tends to love the crap.

After eating only two of the pieces of hot dog that I'd cut up, Gabe decided that the ketchup and the yogurt would be best if they were mixed together. So he scooped several spoonfuls of the pink and blue gunk into the puddle of ketchup and mixed them together. And then he ate it. This was a "during" picture. By the end, everything on his plate but the corner of just yogurt was gone. He dipped first his hot dogs and then the tater tots into the ketchup and yogurt mix and ate every bite of them. Then he spooned up the remaining ketchup/yogurt monstrosity and ate that by itself.

And this from the kid who took one bite of the bierock I gave him last week, chewed it once, then spit the partially masticated mess out--not onto his plate but off to the side to make the most dramatic, messy statement about it as possible. Then he acted like I'd tried to poison him. A bierock! One of nature's perfect foods! Truly, it boggles the mind.