The Green Spoon's Quest for the Holy Grail

A special question from The Green Spoon—a weekly newsletter delivering beautiful ideas for feeding small humans.

Dear Tamar:

We have toddlers who eat....all. the. time. Even if we have things like a batch of chickpeas or a roasted kabocha squash in reserve, we get caught out around snack time. How? How is a parent meant to tackle the eternal conundrum of the portable, relatively non-perishable, non-messy snack that their kid might actually eat?!

Fanny + Greta from the Green Spoon

Dear Fanny and Greta,

When I was a college student living in Jerusalem, I lost my passport—left it in a taxi—the night before a planned family trip to Petra. They went, and I tagged along with friends to Turkey, buying a ticket at the airport. (It was 1998.)

I’d read next to nothing about Turkey. I had no agenda, no opinions about our destinations or our routes. I was, by default, open-minded. Each view was a surprise, each bite of yogurt-sauced pasta, or grape leaf, or artichoke, a thrill. I briefly existed in a state of delight.

This trip has achieved the status of axiom in my mind. Though I don’t always abide by it, I know from experience that the path to delight is the dislodging of expectations—which I think applies to your question in at least two ways.

First: I’m sure you know this, but meal categories are beautifully subjective. My birdlike, chain-smoking Filologia Española professor at the University of Barcelona breakfasted on bocadillos de jamon and beer—at the nearest bar to campus. When I traveled to Hanoi, my daily breakfast was a soup of fried eel.

My son snacked, as a toddler, on: cold hotdogs, silver dollar pancakes (almond flour with flax and sesame seeds, usually), tiny muffins I made by the double batch (recipe below), cold roasted carrots, cold fried zucchini, cold roasted mushrooms, prosciutto, rabbit confit, cashews, boiled eggs, canned mackerel, canned sardines, popcorn, homemade granola bars, and lots and lots of buttered rolls. The uniting factor was that they were food—even the buttered rolls, which I collected from whatever restaurant we’d recently eaten at, buttering one or two, wrapping them in a napkin, and storing them in my bag. There’s probably still one in a bag somewhere…

Second: (This may cause you both to slam your laptops shut.) For a year, I kept my son ignorant of pretzels—I’m a former Chez Panisse cook, and a quiet believer in whole foods. Then, when he was one, he went to daycare. There were loving caregivers, soft carpets, trunks of handmade costumes and musical instruments, and bowls of pretzels. I paced and worried. My work training his palate was being undone, one Snyder’s rod at a time. Except that the world turns too quickly for that. My son was briefly obsessed with pretzels. As he was with Pirate’s booty and Goldfish, and probably a lot of other snacks. I didn’t offer them. But friends did. His world grew. He grew. Each obsession faded. I tried to treat each unexpected view and taste as a thrill, rather than a threat.

My answer to how? is to loosen your hold. To pack jars of what’s in the fridge, regardless of what it is. Or a can of fish. To pack muffins, or pack a burger, cold mushrooms, a single egg. Then, get tired of hauling food around, and thank heavens for your stash of napkin-wrapped buttered rolls. Before you can solve the problem more neatly, your toddlers will cease needing the solution—a fact of which they’ll inform you by rejecting everything you bring, everything you’ve thought of, and all the advice you’ve received.

Dear cooks, giving good food to our children is a holy undertaking. Your quest is worthy. But remember that expectations and perfectionism share a bed—handmaidens who whisper secrets to each other late into the night. I recommend being cordial to both, but trusting neither. A more trustworthy path is to let go some of the planning, and instead chase delight—where your children can follow.

Here is a recipe for the almond muffins I probably still have some of, frozen, somewhere.

Carrot  Coconut Almond Muffins (from The Everlasting Meal Cookbook) 30 min

Butter for the muffin tin
2 cups almond flour (or another nut flour)
3/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
3 large eggs
1/2 cup olive oil
1/3 cup maple syrup
1 cup grated carrot

Heat the oven to 350 F. Butter a muffin tin. In a bowl, combine the nut flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, and coconut. In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs, oil, maple syrup, and grated carrot. Stir the egg mixture into the nut mixture. Spoon the batter into the prepared muffin tin and bake until a skewer emerges clean, 20-22 min. These freeze very well.