I’m not sure when it happened, but when I was a tyke, I was given something with tomato in it. As soon as that gooey, bugery texture touched my tongue, I gagged. I was nauseated. I instantly started fasting, losing my appetite for days [or was it hours?], recovering from attempted poisoning.
And ever since, I’ve been convinced that tomato isn’t really a food. It’s a fruit, sure, but it’s not supposed to be eaten until you grind and smash the evil soul out of it to make pizza sauce or ketchup. It’s like ginger root. You don’t just chew on it like a Twizzler. You have to mutate it until its pungent taste, small and texture is reduced to an aftertaste.
The so-called taste of tomatoes makes me want to vomit. Whenever I order a burger from wherever, I always repeat twice — I repeat, twice — “No tomato!” And every now and again when my karma is running low, I sink my teeth into the squishy texture of a tomato which causes my tongue to shrivel up like, well, you know, like when a man gets in the pool.
Another appetite killer is cilantro. Unlike tomato, there’s no way to camouflage the dirty sink water taste of cilantro. If there’s a tomato in my food, I generally can rescue my food by picking out the tomato. Cilantro, though, infects whatever food it touches. You can scrape away all those little poisonous leaves, but you can’t get rid of the stench.
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So far, Najwa seems to like everything. Fruits, the kind you see next to the dictionary definition of fruit [has anyone seen a picture of a tomato next to fruit?], she loves. Veggies make her make funny faces as she adjusts her taste buds, but for the most part she’ll eat them all. I still hesitate with squash, but she doesn’t seem to mind the taste nor the fact that half of the foods we food her look like beverages down after a night at the club.
When it comes to meats, she has to go to war to get the little itty bitty chucks down, sometimes depositing a mouthful back on us. I would conclude maybe she’s not into chicken, but when we hand her a chicken bone [it may seem ghetto, or barbaric, but she's so damn cute sucking on the chicken bone], she wails when we try to take it away. Rib bones are even harder to pry from her tiny fingers.
But as she grows more teeth and we start diversifying her menu, it’s going to be fascinating to see what she continues to eat, even reluctantly like her oatmeal in the morning, and what she spits back out opting to starve rather than trust we know what we’re doing.
The plan after her first birthday [just a month to go!] is to season her foods with herbs and spices. A little oregano and paprika here, some basil leaves and cinnamon there. I’m even down for a smattering of Lowry’s, though I’m pretty much against MSG. That is, unless I’m eating a Jeno’s frozen pizza. Nduku refuses to let me sprinkle some cayenne pepper on her puree though. I put it on everything I eat.
Then we’ll start making Najwa’s pureed foods ourselves, aiming to wean her off the processed, jarred foods so she knows what food really tastes like. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-20s before I realize Kraft Macaroni and Cheese wasn’t really how mac ‘n cheese was supposed to taste. I still prefer Del Monte’s canned cut green beans over the fresh ones from the produce department.
And eventually, we’ll reach that day when we test her palette with the two foods that Nduku absolutely loves, the same two foods that I adamantly despise. And if Najwa is inflicted with faulty taste buds and actually thinks that she likes the tomato’s alien texture and cilantro’s disease-like flavor, she better hope mommy is cooking because I edit any recipe requiring those ingredients.
