24/06/2024
It had to be done, right? 😂
Having found myself in the above situation many times lately (the bread thing, not dancing on stage with Taylor Swift sadly) here’s how I approach this:
🥖 Step 1: Do nothing. Remember that the division of responsibility means we provide the options, our dining customer gets to choose from those options. If she chooses only the bread, that’s her choice and we respect that.
🥖 Step 2: Keep calm and remember how I basically lived on bread rolls as a kid and now eat pretty much every single food under the sun. While goats cheese, anchovies, mushrooms and salmon took a LONG time to like, we seem to come out of the womb appreciating bread for its wondrous properties.
🥖 Step 3: Feel happy that I know she is eating enough to feel full and is content being at the family dinner table. At nearly 3, this in itself can be a huge challenge. Taylor’s song “The Bolter” is surely about a toddler fleeing a meal. 😅 My goal right now is to make the experience of dinner a positive one to prevent any stress around eating.
🥖 Step 4: If there are leftovers, I often serve these for lunch or a snack the next day, sans bread. The extra time to process the confronting reality of the existence of non-bread foods can help.
🥖 And finally, occasionally, I bring the bread out a little while into the meal to give other foods an opportunity to have a look in. It’s impossible to compete with bread. It’s the Taylor Swift of kid food choices. So, following advice, sometimes the bread is “still cooking.” This takes advantage of a hunger window and means other meal components get picked at. My objective here is not nutrition, as she eats a wide variety of foods throughout the day, but to try to preserve variety wherever possible.
I hope this helps,
Love The Chairman of the Tortured Unpaid Chefs Department 🩶👩🏻🍳
