My kid ate squid.

While on vacation, we broke the long-standing, elusive Picky Eater Taste Barrier and the list of new-things-tried grew by the day.  I cannot tell you how happy this made me, the Frustrated Foodie who for many years could not cook interesting dishes or dine out at adventurous restaurants with her whole family.  It felt like nothing short of a small miracle that those kids flew right by “no ingredients touching” to frutti del mar and cioppino.

Hallelujah.

We arrived back home, and inevitably the children found the old food routines easier to stomach.  I was disappointed but started to cook more interesting dishes anyway.  Slowly, both of them have shown more and more willingness to at least try new things.  “Hey, that actually smells good”, they would announce with equal parts surprise and confusion.  Indeed, my jaw dropped this week when The Professor ate jambalaya with shrimp and spicy sausage.  Two helpings.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know people talk about jaw dropping — it is a familiar idiom — but I actually felt the drop of my jawbone and it’s companion reaction, mouth hanging agape.  “I almost fell out of my chair” and “knock me over with a feather” also  felt like actual possibilities.  He just looked at me with a tween eyebrow lift and said “What’s the big deal, Mom?”,  shoveling in this (admittedly delicious) concoction of innumerable ingredients as if he had been trying new foods I made, and finding them incredibly delicious, for all of his days.

I am happy to pretend along with him, and his brother, that they were not picky for the last decade.

Another case in point:  until recently, I quite possibly had the only two children on the planet who did not like sandwiches.  How can someone not like sandwiches?  It’s bread, meat and maybe cheese.  Jeez.  But while on a weekend trip, my cousin made sandwiches for a picnic lunch, and low and behold The Little One shoveled them in.  When we returned home, he asked if I could possibly make delicious sandwiches like that here at our home.  Hhmmm, I think I can duplicate the recipe:  let’s see, one slice of whole wheat bread, one slice of turkey, one slice of cheddar, another slice of bread.  Press down and wrap in make-shift materials because the rental house does not have any kitchen supplies.  My son was amazed.  “Wow, I didn’t know you could make this!”  Suddenly I was a star, the purveyor of deliciousness heretofore never seen in this house.

I guess I’ll also pretend that I did not serve turkey sandwiches 187 times in the last ten years.

All in all, a small price to pay for my new stardom.  I’ll take small miracles wherever I can find them.