We Have Debris!!

One thing I always marvel at is a child's palate. It doesn't matter how well you try to hide something in food they almost always find it. I mean I suppose you could puree all of your ingredients before you put them into your recipe but who has the time or patience to do that? Not me. So I just chop my onions as fine as I can, only use the spices that don't leave black specks in the food, and never, ever let them see little green leafy things.

Earlier this week I made lasagna. It was a nice lasagna with sausage that was left over from a pasta dinner a few nights earlier. Of course, Sticky Buns, my youngest doesn't like sausage which created challenge number one. I chopped the sausage kind of small because there were only about four links left and I wanted it to be spread somewhat evenly throughout the dish. I know that a larger slicing of the sausage would have been easier to pick out of the lasagna, but I went smaller. That made it a little more time consuming but he managed to get most if not all of the sausage.

Mini Buns actually likes everything in lasagna but for some reason felt the need to dissect it none the less and complain about each ingredient separately. Oh, he ate it. Cleaned the plate and asked for seconds. Later he told me he loved it. But just to make dinnertime fun he HAD to dissect it and see what was there.

Always the most challenging, and today was no exception, Cheddar Buns, my daughter didn't even want to discuss it. You see she will eat just about any dairy product you put in front of her but tomato sauce is right out. She will eat pizza every day but try to put sauce on her pasta and let the battle begin. Lasagna, being covered in sauce by nature, was an extremely tough sell. When all was said and done I'm not exactly sure how much she ate but fortunately Daddy had the forethought to leave some lasagna noodles uncontaminated and free of the red elixir from hell. A few sauce-less noodles, some butter or as we prefer, Smart Balance, and as much cheese as she can get away with and she is as happy as a lark.

The definition of a delta loosely translated is the debris deposit at the mouth of a river, i.e. the Mississippi delta. What I did not know is the debris pile around the edge of your plate is the definition of Lasagna. My oldest, I'll have to come up with a nickname for him later because he has instructed me not to use anything with buns in it, ate three or maybe even four helpings of Daddy's lasagna. The entire time he was eating he was telling me how much he LOVED the lasagna, "It's the best!", "I want more lasagna", "Can we have lasagna again tomorrow?", he was building a debris field around the edge of his plate. Not just any debris field, oh no. This debris field was stacked so high and tight around the edge of the plate I think the New Orleans Army Corps of Engineers would have killed for the blueprints. It was like a levy protecting the food in the middle of the plate from any potential spills from the other side of the table.

I don't even know what was in the debris field nor do I care to know. I was as impressed with his levy as he was of my lasagna. The entire time he was building it, subconsciously mind you, all I could think was, "that debris field is awesome!", "it's the best!.", and "Could you make another debris field tomorrow?". It was truly a masterpiece.

I know my son is destined for great things and whatever he decides to do when he grows and moves out into the world I will support 100%. But in the event that his first choice does not pan out, which will not happen, I know that he has a great future in engineering.