While in Louisville, I picked up an issue of The Bourbon Review, and in it was a food article that featured a photo of asparagus and potatoes. They weren't cooked in any special way, but the presentation was appealing. So as Stephen grilled the chicken last night, I attempted to reproduce the asparagus and potatoes I saw in the magazine. The magazine's photo showed the asparagus arranged like a sunburst on a round plate with the cut up roasted potatoes piled in the middle.
What's so special about cut up potatoes? I wondered. What if I made potato balls? I got out my little cookie batter scoop, which is a smaller version of an ice cream scoop, and started scooping starchy balls out of Russett Burbank potatoes. Immediately, I realized the drawback of making potato balls. Much of the tuber gets wasted. One Russett Burbank can yield about six potato balls. What's left of the potato looks like a white gritty cave. Reluctant to waste food, I cut up the remains of the potatoes, roasting the potato balls on one side of the casserole dish and the remains on the other side.
When the potatoes were done, I cooked the asparagus and set out to arrange my dish. As you can see from the photo, the potatoes look pretty good. The asparagus--not so much. My new Fiestaware plates were not big enough for this arrangement. Hence, my asparagus-potato sunburst looked more like a malnourished spider.
No biggie. Once dinner was done, we all served ourselves from the stove. I kept an eye on Lawson's plate to make sure he put something green on it. I was delighted that he got some asparagus without my making him do so.
Lawson is the slowest eater on the planet. We'll have the whole kitchen cleaned up except for his plate because he's still working on his meal. Part of his snail pace is due to reluctance to eat his veggies. Davis learned at about the same age to bite the bullet and eat his vegetables first. Not Lawson. He still procrastinates where vegetables are concerned, and if he really doesn't want to eat them, he'll complain that they're "stringy."
Last night the asparagus was stringy.
Supper started at 7:00. At 8:11, Lawson still had not eaten his stringy asparagus. Truly, I think he had just let the asparagus go cold, but he insisted stringiness was the problem. Anyway, at some point, he gathered up his chicken bones into his paper napkin and took them to the trash can to throw them away. And that's when I noticed the green asparagus tips poking out of the napkin.
"I enjoyed dinner," he said, just as he was opening the trash can lid.
"Thank you," I replied. "You can also enjoy those asparagus you're about to throw away."
Lawson exhaled an exasperated, "Aw, man" and returned to his plate. He refused to eat the asparagus in his napkin because those spears had somehow become sullied by the chicken bones. So I put three other asparagus spears on his Fiestaware plate and said, "Eat them."
Once when Lawson was about five years old, Stephen grilled chicken for dinner, and Lawson ate six drumsticks (we'd bought a mutant chicken), all the while poo-pooing Stephen's and my warnings, "You'll make yourself sick."
"No I won't," he insisted.
I made asparagus for dinner that night too, and I made him eat one spear. From his wails and moans, you would have thought I was making him participate in an episode of Fear Factor.
After his bath that night, Lawson got sick. He swore up and down it was because of the asparagus spear.
Last night reminded me of the night of the six drumsticks. Fortunately, Lawson did not invoke that awful memory. Instead, he repeated his protests against stringiness. Finally, Stephen had to offer an ultimatum: "It's 8:11 right now. If you don't eat that asparagus by 8:15, I'm getting you up at 6:30 tomorrow morning."
Lawson met his deadline.
No comments:
Post a Comment