03/07/2026
Foods and kids (and adults!) can be hard. Love this approach and understanding
Last night, I made shakshuka for dinner. One of my favorites. It’s a tomato, bell pepper (capsicum), onion sauce with warm spices and eggs cracked into it to poach. We eat it on sourdough bread and I love it. It’s one of the foods I like to make for dinner and then bring leftovers for lunches to work.
As I usually do with almost all foods, I served my kids plates of deconstructed food. Some toasted plain bread, an egg, some of the shakshuka sauce, some fruit alongside. In my family, we don’t personally do “you have to eat everything” or even “you have to take a bite”. The kids can eat whatever they want of what is offered.
My daughter ate just the fruit and left all the shakshuka untouched. (I put it in my lunch for work.) My son has been getting independently interested in wanting to eat stuff *not* deconstructed, though. He asked me to put some shakshuka with an egg on it on his bread, like I had it on my bread.
Then, he ate a plate of deconstructed food, while just…looking at the one with the sauce and egg on the bread. He did not touch it. He did not lick it. He just looked at it while he ate the deconstructed food.
I didn’t say anything at all whatsoever. Later, unprompted, he said, “I couldn’t want to eat that one. I’m sorry.”
“That’s no problem, buddy,” I said, and I meant it.
I wonder if it might have bothered me if I didn’t live inside of my own body and know, intimately, how tricky food can be. How I’ve said to my husband after a long day, “we need to change the dinner plan — I can’t emotionally handle trying to eat a bean tonight.”
How I carried a container of applesauce/apple puree here in Oz — one of the few fruits I can reliably eat — I carried it in my lunchbox to work for 5 days here before I was able to actually eat it during lunch. Because no matter how much I could logically tell myself “there’s only so many ways you can blend an apple, it will be very very similar to the brand and type you always ate in the States,” I still knew that it *could* be different. I had seen the word “pear” in the ingredients on the package; the package and brand was different. It was different. It might be different.
I wasn’t panicking, I wasn’t freaking out, but my brain needed extra-extra time to prepare to be ready to try it.
So when my son wanted to eat meal components while gazing at what the finished meal would look like, I suspected his brain might be doing that extra-extra preparation too.
This isn’t a trick. This isn’t a hack. This isn’t a way to fool your kid into eating new stuff. My son might never end up trying shakshuka. Or he might try it and find he really doesn’t like red bell peppers. Or a half-dozen other things. This isn’t about that.
This is about me having learned in adulthood to be able to be kind to my brain when it does some extra-extra thinking, and extending that kindness to my kid. This is me inviting you to it, too.
[image description: Shakshuka! It’s in a pot. It’s on my stove. It has a big spoon in it. Uhh…my brain is really tired and I’m not sure what else to put here. Shakshuka! End description.]
