How to Eat Like a Keckler

September 30, 2002

Did anyone ever read How to Eat Like a Child by Delia Ephron? The part that describes how to build a volcano and forest out of a plate of vegetables and mashed potatoes rather than eating them was all about me. I was such a picky eater growing up. I hated almost everything except grilled cheese sandwiches. In fact, by age eight, I OD'd on grilled cheese sandwiches with what I considered disastrous consequences. I won't go into detail, so I'll just say that I learned the hard way what happens when you have too much cheese and not enough fruit, and I was so traumatized by this that I avoided grilled cheese (or any other kind of cheese) for a very long time.

Someday, I'll list all the things I hated and how much that list has changed but I'm too hungry to go into that now. Point is, my mother had a tough time feeding me, because I retched loudly at the sight of most cooked vegetables, grains, and casseroles. There were even a few meats I didn't get along with. It wasn't just me, either -- my older sister was equally picky. My parents finally had to institute a "Three more bites and you're done" rule. Basically, after sitting at the dinner table long after my parents had finished eating and cleared everything else away, they would get tired of trying to get us to finish what was on our plates and tell us, "Okay, just eat three more bites and you can be excused." They knew that we kids had the stamina to outlast their patience. We would have sat at that table until we left for college rather than finish our dinner. The Three More Bites rule was often accompanied by dramatic gagging and face-making as we used our water to treat the three bites like medication that had to be washed down. That way we didn't have to chew anything, and if we didn't have to chew anything, it meant we didn't have to taste anything. My dad used to lecture us that sloshing down our food that way meant that we weren't going to get the nutrition from the food. Number one, kids don't care about nutrition, so using that as an argument isn't going to get you very far. And number two, it's false. As I've come to learn in my adulthood, as long as the food hits your stomach, it's going to get dissolved into your bloodstream -- chewed up or not. How else do you explain oysters? However, there were times when even the Three More Bites rule was too much for us. We concocted some elaborate and spectacularly faulty schemes for getting rid of our food without ever actually putting it in our mouths.

First, there were our three cats who always hung around under the table at meal time, rubbing up against our legs suggestively. Their overly-friendly behavior might have had something to do with the fact that my sister and I would carefully slide bits of food off our plates and oh-so-casually drop our hand down to release it to the cats. We had this one cat, Feisty, who would eat everything -- peas, meat, succotash, whatever. Another cat, Pooter, was a little too predatory in his methods of dealing with table scraps and nearly gave us away a few times. Pooter was an incredibly sweet and docile silver-grey cat who had the habit of growling whenever he chewed. My sister and I would bang our feet, clatter our silverware, or start talking at the tops of our voices to cover up what was going on under the table. Once, my mother got really suspicious and looked under the table to see Pooter wrestling with a particularly large piece of pork. That was another mistake we learned not to repeat. You couldn't give the cats more food than they could handle in one bite, or you ran the risk of discovery.

Second, there were paper napkins that had to be disposed of once the plate was cleared away. Over the course of the meal, Undesirables would slowly make their way into our laps, and when enough had been "eaten," we would declare, "Finished! Can I be excused?" We'd carefully ball up the loaded napkin and ditch it in the kitchen garbage on our way to grab a Ding Dong. However, there was always the chance my mother decided to use cloth napkins, so we had to have a contingency plan. If baked potatoes were served that night, Undesirables could be surreptitiously sneaked into the cleaned-out skins. My parents gave up insisting we eat the skin of the potato long before they instituted the Three More Bites rule. The cleaned-out skins were then carefully crushed to make them look more empty than they were. There was one flaw in this plan: my dad, the human garbage disposal. If Dad was on K.P. that night, he often liked to stand over the sink, clearing the remnants on our plates into his own stomach. Therefore, our hidden Undesirables ran the risk of being discovered before disappearing into his great maw. However, if one of us was in charge of clearing up -- a duty we often volunteered for in order to have control of the Undesirables, Baked Potato Skin Plan in effect or not -- we were golden.

Third, my parents soon got wise to the paper napkin disposal tactic and insisted on checking them before we left the table; this meant we had to go back to the cutting board. We didn't really appreciate the value of clean clothes back in the day, so stuffing Undesirables in our pockets seemed like a good idea. We'd spirit the Undesirables off to the nearest bathroom where we'd unload them into those bathroom-sized Dixie cups and toss them into the bathroom trash bins. Now, this would have worked had we not trained our cats so well. I was up in my room reading Dragonsinger when my mom called me back downstairs. On the maroon shag carpet in the hallway, leading back into the bathroom, was a trail of peas, carrots, corn and lima beans. At the end of this partially masticated parade was a shredded Dixie cup and a tipped-over waste paper bin. Thinking he was doing his job, Feisty had sniffed out the butter coating the Undesirables and gone to town.

Fourth, there was the Great Outdoors. This worked only after we learned not to deposit the Undesirables so close to home. I dropped some chunks of cooked carrots out of the bathroom window and down into a deep window well. The problem was that the window well was also right outside the back door, and therefore the bright orange carrots against the dark backdrop of old wet leaves were just a touch obvious.

From that moment on, we got more elaborate in our schemes for hiding food inside. After all, it was a bit suspicious to run outside into a Minnesota winter night for no apparent reason. It wasn't so suspicious when it was my older sister (age fifteen) running outside to scream at the top of her lungs. This usually occurred in the middle of an argument with my parents about her buying too many Benetton sweaters or cutting up my father's pajamas to make skirts. Somewhere along the road of their relationship, my mother had suggested that practice of letting off steam, and my sister used it to its fullest advantage. But that's another can of kidney beans.

During the warmer months, we ate in the room attached to the kitchen. It was flanked on two sides by double screens that went as high as the ceiling, and it was therefore called The Sun Room. Anyway, the sun room had two wall shelves full of my mother's cookbooks. These cookbooks were rarely used, because my mom kept her recipe box -- pretty much the only thing she used except on very rare occasions -- next to the stove. I think it was on a night we had hamburgers for dinner that my sister got her brilliant idea of the new place to get rid of Undesirables. Don't get me wrong -- we liked my mom's hamburgers, but they were just so thick that it was often difficult to finish them. Of course, there were the times that my mom tried to get creative on us and mushed chopped onions and green peppers into the ground beef. And in that case, we actually didn't like the hamburgers. Whatever kind of hamburgers they were that night, at the earliest possible moment, my sister peeled off her bun, grabbed what was left of her patty, got on her chair, and stuffed it behind a book in on the top-most shelf. Sunday nights, we set up the card table and ate in the den so we could watch Sixty Minutes and Murder, She Wrote. To this day, the sound of the ticking stopwatch reminds me of slightly tepid Campbell's chicken noodle soup in brown earthenware mugs and B.L.T.s. Of course, we didn't always like the B.L.T.s. Did I mention that the den has floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on three walls?

Christmastime and colder weather brought us back into the dining room, which didn't have bookshelves, but it also brought elaborate faux holly centerpieces. Cooked spinach was then, and in fact still is, the bane of my existence. My mother knew this, yet still she served it to us. Luckily, my sister's shrewd sense of color had noted that the putrid black-green of the wet spinach was exactly the same color as the centerpiece. What remains a mystery to this day is what the hell happened to all that spinach after it went into the middle of the centerpiece. We never smelled it moldering. Years later, we even checked the interior, but found no sign of it. My mother never even knew about it until we confessed a bunch of youthful peccadilloes to her over a few glasses of wine (when we were too old to be grounded), so it's not like she ever went and cleaned the centerpiece out.

To this day, my mother is still finding fossilized pieces of sandwiches, hamburgers, and other less identifiable remnants when she pulls out Martin Chuzzlewit or The Joy of Cooking.