Passing more than my genes on

So I'm taking Marla's advice and purging my drafts. Joy of joys, it looks as though bloody Blogger ate one of my posts... it had pictures and everything... I may try to rewrite, just because I really liked it. I guess that's the price of not publishing. Aargh!!!

This one, the one that bloody Blogger didn't eat, is from Tuesday or so...

I have some weird food habits. I've mentioned a couple of them here already. Sugar Daddy loves to make fun of them. That is, until he actually tries it. Then he realizes that there is some method to my madness. He doesn't convert, because he's too lazy for the mental strength involved, but at least he can see where I'm coming from.

So today's weird food habit: I leave the best for last. Always. This may not seem so weird, but I put A LOT of thought into the decision, and sometimes I even need to stop eating as I get close to the end of a meal so that I can figure it out. Throughout a meal, I expend considerable thought deciding what bit I want to eat last so that I leave the best flavours lingering in my mouth. I have several strategies: if it's a sort of meat, potato and veg meal, like a turkey dinner, it's pretty easy. I just decide what I want to eat last and do it. Usually it's the turkey, sometimes it's the mashed potatoes.

If it's a sandwich or a pizza, it gets more complicated. Here's where the strategy comes in. I have to be totally focused on the end goal from the first bite, to ensure maximum topping coverage and diversity for my final bite. In sandwiches, I want to have every possible topping included in that one bite. Usually I eat around the outside first, the crust, because that's where you're liable to come across bare bread, or unbalanced filling ratios. With pizza, I also eat the crust first, and eat around the ideal bite. Depending on the toppings, occasionally I will tolerate fewer than all of the toppings on that final bite, as long as feta or goat's cheese is involved.

I used to employ the same technique on Joe Louis's (jeeze... how do you make that plural? I'm really tempted to put an apostrophe but fear the wrath of blog karma after all my observations of gratuitous apostrophes) and Puff O Fruits in my grade four lunches (I just googled those treats just in case you don't know what they are and found this, so maybe Joe Louis's are just a Canadian thing). This technique totally yields the absolute maximum cake/pastry to cream/fruit ratio.

Curries or stirfries can sometimes be more complicated, because not only do I have to choose the types of veggies to include in the last bite, but I also need to determine the optimum rice to veg ratio. At a curry buffet, with more than one curry on the plate... well you can understand it just gets more difficult to decide which flavours to put together and which are best alone, etc. etc.

Oh... and I mustn't forget the question of quantity, or how much of the best to reserve.

So... this morning I noticed myself applying the most elementary version of this strategy while feeding Swee'pea. Elementary, because he was only eating bananas and oatmeal. But he was demonstrating with great animation that he really really liked the banana, while he found the oatmeal merely edible. So I added as much banana to the oatmeal as I could while reserving a few pieces for pure unadulterated banana pleasure in between the oatmeal mixture, and leaving one good sized bit of banana for last. Judging from the great scrunchy smile on his face, I think he liked my strategy.