Posted by
Ed Lilly on Thursday, May 15, 2008 11:39:30 PM
There are a few slightly unusual foods in any family's repertoire. One of my favorite breakfasts as a kid was cinnamon toast and hot cocoa. My sister and I would dip the toast in our cocoa and devour the soggy toast. I have no idea how that became a breakfast hit for us, and I have never met anyone else who thinks it sounds good. My kids still won't even agree to try it.
Another odd food item that I never questioned is putting grape jelly on the top of a grilled cheese sandwich. As my kids now know, my dad (Papa) did not like cheese as a boy. So to get him to eat a grilled cheese sandwich, his mother (Nana) put grape jelly on the top after she grilled the sandwich. My guess is it was some of her homemade grape jelly which all the grandchildren hoarded as one of our special Christmas gifts. In any event, my dad learned to like grilled cheese sandwiches, and eventually cheese. But more importantly, he passed on the tradition of putting grape jelly on top of a grilled cheese sandwich. I was probably in college before I realized that the rest of the world didn't eat them that way.
Tonight at dinner, I grilled some pork chops that had been marinating in a sauce my lovely wife made for some kabobs that we grilled on Mother's Day. I forgot to baste the chicken kabobs with the extra marinade, so I figured I would throw some pork chops in so it wouldn't got to waste.
Of course, grilling dinner meant having to face the now familiar complaint from our 7 year old that she HATES things that are grilled. I'm not sure why she keeps pointing this out to me, because it hasn't changed the likelihood of whether something will be cooked on the grill, and she winds up eating it when we tell her the alternative is for her to simply be hungry and stop complaining about it. So onto the grill went the pork chops.
Which then brought the added complaint from Miss I-Hate-Grilled-Food that she also hates pork. And of course, that really isn't going to get her very far, as she typically is a good eater when we have things like pork roast.
Well, tonight she decided to try to hold out on eating grilled pork chops. Admittedly, I probably overcooked them a little. I'm funny about not wanting my pork on the medium rare side. Flavor was good with the marinade, but the chops were a touch toward the dry side.
After our daughter finished everything else on her plate, we had to figure out an approach to getting her to eat at least some of her pork chop. My lovely wife thought that applesauce would be perfect. A little applesauce, a little pork chop, all in one delicious bite. It worked well for her, as she made her way quickly through her pork, and then shared some of the applesauce with our 4 year old, who was delighted to make little pork chop and applesauce sandwiches and tell us how delicious it was.
No such luck with our daughter, who has never been a huge applesauce fan.
So what did my wife suggest? Grape jelly. Just dip a bite and eat it. If you like it on a grilled cheese, it should work for a marinaded pork chop, too, she said.
Somewhat surprisingly, our daughter tried it. Apparently the first bite tasted pretty good. But by the second bite, she was done with that taste combination.
At that point, she asked for something a little more reliable, ketchup, and finished her pork chop, leaving her small pile of grape jelly undisturbed for the rest of the meal.