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One Size Dinner Doesn’t Fit All Ages

You wouldn’t expect your sixteen-year-old daughter to keep wearing the one-piece footed “bunny suits” of her preschool years. So why would you assume that your child’s involvement in family dinner will remain unchanged over the course of growing up? When it goes well, the family dinner transforms along with your kids. Your child’s appetite, ability to cook, and readiness to participate in dinner conversation all change dramatically from infancy through young adulthood. A dinner plan for toddlers that involves finger foods and a modest expectation for time spent sitting at the table will look very different for your adolescent children who can discuss a broad range of topics but who need different enticements to keep nightly dinners on their busy dance cards.

Understanding the changing challenges of dinnertime and seeing them in terms of the developmental changes that occur as your children continue to grow allows you to shape dinner to bring out the best in your child. And your ability to redesign a ritual that is attuned to the changing demands of growing children is itself among the hallmarks of a healthy family.

There is one feeding challenge that cuts across all ages and stages, from nursing a baby to feeding an elderly parent: when your carefully prepared meal is rejected. Food and love are so intertwined that it takes a strong parental ego not to feel that you are being rejected when a child refuses your food. But there are so many reasons for a child to turn away from a food offering, reasons that have nothing to do with loving you.

The child might not be hungry because she doesn’t feel well or because she’s been snacking all afternoon. She might not like the smell of the food, or she may want to express her autonomy by taking control of her eating, or she may want to make life harder for you because she’s angry with you or with another child who looked at her cross-eyed on the playground. My point is that food refusal is not a battle to get into with your child. Better to find a peaceful moment later in the day to ask calmly about it, and see if you can come up with ideas to make dinner more appetizing. Or just let it go, and try again tomorrow.

THE FIRST DINNERS: IN THE WOMB AND AT THE BREAST

None of us can remember our very first family dinners. I’m thinking about the meals we had in the dark, cozy confines of the womb, swallowing amniotic fluids, which actually transmit the flavors of chicken curry or matzo ball soup, or whatever our mother had eaten for dinner. There is mounting evidence to support the claim that a mother’s diet during pregnancy paves the way for her baby’s first food preferences.¹ Those in utero slurps of flavored amniotic fluid make babies predisposed to liking the same flavors once they are out of the womb. For example, babies who had repeated exposure to carrot juice during the last trimester of pregnancy had positive facial expressions when they first tried carrot-flavored cereal—”Oh yeah, I remember this yummy taste.”

The wider the range of foods the pregnant mother eats, the more foods the baby will recognize.² My craving for chopped-chicken-liver sandwiches during my first pregnancy may account for my first son’s passion for corned beef with chicken livers; likewise, my avoidance of fish because it made me feel queasy during my second pregnancy might explain my younger son’s early distaste for most fish dishes. Indeed, the foods that one eats during pregnancy can influence one’s child’s receptivity to those foods.

The mother’s role as shaper of her baby’s palate continues during breast-American Management Association • www.amanet.org feeding. A mother’s milk actually takes on the flavors of the food she eats. She creates a bridge from what she eats to what her baby tastes. Since children prefer foods that are familiar, the flavors that babies taste over and over again in their mother’s milk will be their earliest experience of familiar flavors and will likely influence the foods that they gravitate toward when they are offered those same foods in solid form. It is no wonder that preferences for certain cultural foods get laid down during pregnancy and breast-feeding.

Fathers also play a critical role in early feeding. They can provide regular bottles of breast-pumped milk, or of formula, offering a welcome break to a nursing mother. Most important, when fathers leave all the feeding to women, they miss out on one of the coziest, most satisfying parts of taking care of a baby. And feeling left out of the mother-baby dyad feeds its own resentment, so it’s better to figure out a way for both parents to participate in the warm bonding that takes place during feeding.

Regardless of whether a baby is bottle or breast-fed (by mother or father, or both) the feeding relationship is the first crucial task of parenting. When feeding is warm and consistent, it creates a building block for later feelings of attachment. Babies learn they can count on you to take care of their needs. And, since feeding is a reciprocal process, it’s the first place that your baby learns about his impact on you. When he cries, he can get you to feed him. Through a predictable, reliable feeding experience, your baby learns that the world is a safe place. Other caregivers—babysitters, grandparents, daycare staff—also play an important role in creating a warm feeding experience, and they help widen your baby’s understanding of the world as a trustworthy place.

There are many behaviors that help support a positive feeding experience: looking at your baby, holding your baby securely, letting her decide when to eat, how much to have and when to stop, and all this without a lot of interruptions to wipe or burp her. Once your child is about six months old, it is important to let her decide how much to eat and to self-feed. It’s a positive experience for your child to get messy—although I know the cleanup is no fun when she’s making her food into a train track with locomotives going across her high chair—so talk to her in a quiet but encouraging manner. But this is only the first opportunity to make eating enjoyable. There will be lots of other points along the way to direct the train toward a satisfying dinner.

HOW TO MAKE YOUR TODDLER AN ADVENTUROUS EATER

Young kids are not the most civilized dinner companions. Dinnertime can feel like sitting with a group of monkeys who like to throw and smear their food, and have short attention spans once they finish eating. This is a critical time, however, for both parents and children to develop family meals as a ritual. One researcher of family rituals found that by the time kids are preschool age, if parents find little meaning in their daily rituals, they are also less satisfied with their marriages.³ Plus, when children are toddlers, they are more receptive to trying new foods than are children age four to eight. So the preschool years provide a time of great opportunity to get a dinner ritual started and to offer your child many new foods.

While children are toddlers, parents play a key role in encouraging adventurous eating. An effective strategy to prevent picky eating is for parents to model their own enjoyment of foods they are offering their kids at the dinner table. Less effective is for parents to restrict foods or to pressure their kids to eat. If you want your children to try new foods, don’t tell them they’re not allowed to have dessert unless they eat all their vegetables. In a recent study, researchers found that when parents used rewards to encourage food tasting or dismissed a child’s expression of hunger or fullness, the children were almost twice as likely not to eat fruits and vegetables.⁴ A better way is to eat the new food with gusto in front of your children, and then ask, “Would you like to taste it?” You could ask your child to tell you a few words to describe the taste. This focuses your child’s attention on the food, rather than on rejecting it. Also, serving food “family style” in bowls or platters placed on the table allows children to see the adults enjoying a food that the kids can just reach out and try.

ENROLL YOUR YOUNG KIDS AS SOUS-CHEFS

Toddlers will want to be right in the kitchen with you while you are making dinner. Having a low cabinet with a few old pots and pans, wooden spoons, and empty squeeze bottles can keep kids occupied for hours. Or putting a chair up at the sink to allow them to play with soap, eyedroppers, sponges, and plastic buckets can also keep them busy. A young child can also “make” a parallel meal by taking discarded vegetable scraps and mixing them together alongside you.

For young children, actually sitting down and eating dinner might be less important than the fun of helping to create it. Preschoolers, after all, are as interested in the journey as the destination, are as invested in helping to make the meal as in eating it.When you take a walk with them, they may want to pause to look at a piece of trash or stop to pet a dog. They usually don’t march straight ahead intent on arriving at their destination as quickly as possible. So it is with mealtime. The whole process of mixing, stirring, and making a mess fascinates young children. The whirring machines in the kitchen may also be captivating. My son Joe was obsessed with kitchen machines as a toddler, running to the KitchenAid mixer as soon as he woke up in the morning to tell me with a gesture, since he didn’t have the words, that he wanted to beat some eggs. We ate meringues, soufflés, and brownies at least once a day for a year. I would have had an easier time setting limits on this behavior if I also didn’t have a huge sweet tooth.

Of course, there will be many evenings when you just want to get the food on the table as quickly as possible, and having a mess-generating sous-chef will be annoying. There might be other nights when it is relaxing to cook dinner in a quiet kitchen while your partner entertains or bathes the children somewhere else. But one of the great joys of having toddlers in the kitchen is their willingness to jump in and help—and some recipes particularly lend themselves to young children.

Susan Swick is a child psychiatrist and the mother of four children under the age of eight. At her house, the dinner meal starts while she is cooking and can last for an hour and a half, even if the sit-down part of the meal is only ten or fifteen minutes. By encouraging her children to cook alongside her, she extends the time she spends with them, and she gets them involved and interested in the meal. As an extra bonus, a child’s participation in making the meal usually guarantees that the child is invested in wanting to eat his own creation. A young cook might even try to entice his siblings into trying the dish.

One favorite all-hands-on family dinner at the Swick-Troekel house is Origami Dumplings (see page 30). If I hadn’t witnessed this family making these dumplings, I wouldn’t have believed that such a multistep recipe with so many kids was possible. I don’t think I could have pulled this off with my two children when they were so young. But the kids had a lot of fun, and the results were delicious.

Eight-year-old Jacob and five-year-old Lily stuffed the square wrappers with carrots, cabbage, and tofu, and then folded each one in a different origami-like creation to resemble a boat, a hat, or an animal. Meanwhile, four-year-old Minha nibbled at the stuffing while stirring together carrot shavings and broccoli scraps with a little water to make her own concoction. One-year-old Luke ate the cooked vegetables in the dumpling stuffing, and his older brother and sisters fed him in his high chair. The dumplings are a complete meal of vegetables and protein—a crowd-pleaser for all ages.

The main challenge at this stage of development is making a dinner that will appeal to both your young children and to grown-ups, since the last thing you want to do is make multiple meals. It’s also important to manage your expectations so that you don’t get discouraged if dinner is over in a flash. You are setting down the foundation by establishing a ritual that your child will grow into. A few basic principles can help:

• Create meals that have some flexibility built into them. For example, you can roll some chicken tenders in breadcrumbs and Parmesan cheese for the kids. Then, as Laurie Colwin wrote in her book Home Cooking, you can also mix up some mustard with crushed garlic, a dash of cinnamon, and a pinch of cayenne pepper. Slather this mixture on some other chicken tenders and roll in breadcrumbs. Dab all of the chicken with a little butter, and pop it into a 375-degree oven. At the end of one hour, the kids will have tasty cheesy chicken, and the parents will have a somewhat spicier version.

• Don’t underestimate your toddler’s taste buds. The idea that young children and adults must eat different foods might be a myth created by marketers and food manufacturers. After all, the food industry stands to make more money if parents believe that their children need brightly colored cereals and lunches packaged with toys than if parents and children can enjoy the same real food together.

• One pediatrician I interviewed about family dinners advised that young children should never be given “separator plates” because it makes them grow up thinking that foods shouldn’t touch. Then, they may shun dishes like stews and salads and want only plain pasta.

• Involve toddlers in the meal preparation. Pulling basil leaves off stems, spinning salad greens, plopping chopped vegetables into a salad or a pan, smelling a spice, setting the timer, tasting the soup to see if it needs more salt, sprinkling cheese on vegetables, mashing cooked vegetables, and turning on and off a food processor are some of the many things that young children can do.

• Ask young children to flip through a cookbook and choose a dinner they would like to help with. Mollie Katzen’s Honest Pretzels and Pretend Soup, and Sally Sampson’s ChopChop offer recipes that are appealing and accessible to young kids.

• Play is the work of childhood, so you may want to provide toddlers with ways to play with food. One example is to ask your child to arrange cut-up vegetables as a face on each family member’s plate. (See Chapter 5 for more ideas.)

• Avoid letting food became an area of struggle over who has power. Food is an area where kids assert power when they don’t have power in other parts of their lives, and most young children don’t wield all that much power (other than the occasional public temper tantrum when parents may be willing to concede to any demands to get this to stop). Letting your children have choices at the table and in other areas of their lives will make food less charged. For example, if your child refuses to eat a particular meal, it’s best to stay calm and not send her away from the table. You might offer her an alternative, such as cereal with milk, a bowl of yogurt, or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—choices, yes, but nothing too exciting, and nothing that makes too much extra work for you.

• If your child insists on eating the same foods, like pasta, night after night, roll with it. You can offer many vegetables, fruits, and protein as “sides” or even mixed in with the pasta. Just keep offering new foods, and try not to get discouraged. For everyone’s sanity, you don’t want to make mealtime a big struggle, and in the context of a relaxed dinner, a child will be much more likely to try new foods.

DINNER WITH SCHOOL-AGE KIDS: ADDING COMPETENCE AND RULES INTO THE MIX

The years between six and twelve are about learning to share and compromise—lessons that your children will absorb in the classroom, on the playground, and around the dinner table. Just as kids are learning that they cannot always get their own way when choosing a game to play at recess, they will learn at home that not everyone gets their choice of meal every night. You may find that your kids want the meal choice to be “fair,” each child getting to choose one meal a week, for example, or each getting the chance to veto one proposed meal. Children will want “airtime” at the dinner table to be equitably distributed as well, although more reserved children might need coaxing to tell a story about their day.

As children become more aware of the world around them, they might start to ask for foods they have seen advertised on TV or clamor for foods they have eaten at their friends’ houses. At this time your family’s identity as distinct and different from others can emerge, and what you serve at dinner can be one of the defining features. Some of my sons’ friends liked to come over for spicy sesame noodles or apple-and-cheese crepes, while my sons coveted the brisket at one friend’s house and the traditional Chinese jook at a neighbor’s.

When children are school-age, it becomes harder to protect them from the onslaught of marketing aimed at enticing them to consume fatty foods, soft drinks, and other unhealthy treats. It’s also the easiest time to engage them in eating dinner with their parents. (Indeed, more than half of nine-year-olds eat dinner with their families every day, compared to only a third of fourteen-year-olds.)⁵

As they progress through elementary school, girls and boys become competent to read and follow recipes. They can help with setting the table, clearing their places, and aiding in the cleanup. Their involvement in the dinner ritual contributes to their interest in it. At this stage, my kids wanted to be more involved in cooking, an impulse I encouraged. One of their favorite games was to create a restaurant with tablecloths, menus that they printed, and a pad to take orders. They would send me out to do their shopping and then would let me hang around as a sous-chef while they created their own concoctions.

MAKING DINNERS THAT ENGAGE SIX- TO TWELVE-YEAR-OLD KIDS

One challenge at this stage is your child’s increasing awareness of the outside world, and with it the idea that there are other foods to eat besides the ones in their house. It’s also a time to harness the school-age child’s wish to be more competent and to play by the rules. Here are few developmentally informed guidelines to keep in mind:

• Since school-age kids like structure and order, they may feel comforted by a predictable schedule of meals. For example, in my sister’s family, Tuesday night was seafood, Wednesday was chicken, Thursday was tacos, Friday night pasta with pesto and chicken sausages, and so on. This routine cuts down on conflict if your children can agree on five or six meals. Often, this routine needs to be tweaked or altered to prevent boredom or to accommodate new tastes or the demands of a new season.

• At this stage of development, kids are very interested in foods they have seen advertised on TV or eaten in restaurants. It can be fun to re-create one of these meals at home. For example, most supermarkets offer ready-made pizza dough. It’s simple to roll it out on a floured surface, and then place it on an oiled cookie sheet. Spread on tomato sauce from a jar, and customize the pizza with mushrooms, peppers, onions, sliced pepperoni, eggplant, or anything else that appeals to you and your kids. Sprinkle Parmesan or mozzarella cheese (or both) on top, and bake for about 10 minutes in a 450-degree oven. Other restaurant-type meals that translate easily into home kitchens are tacos (see the recipe on page 100) and crepes (see the recipe on page 36).

• This is a time when kids are getting more involved in activities outside the house, so finding a regular time and place for dinner can present a challenge. Family dinners sometimes happen on a ball field, in the stands of a basketball court, or backstage at a play rehearsal. It’s better to be flexible about bringing a picnic that everyone can partake of than to give up on dinner altogether. One building block for a portable meal is Asian chicken wings (see the recipe on p. 37).

• Do a role reversal one night a week when you have your children do the cooking. In our house, I went to a meeting every other Thursday night. On those nights, from the time my sons were ten and twelve, they did the cooking, always making some kind of beef, lamb, or pork dish—foods I never made.

• Invite your children to practice resistance to destructive media messages. Ask children why they think TV ads are advertising processed food in a plastic container rather than carrots and celery. Or ask them what would happen if junk food carried a high tax the way cigarettes do. Or what it would be like if their school refused to sell unhealthy food in the cafeteria.

ASIAN CHICKEN WINGS (FOR 6 TO 8)

1 cup soy sauce

½ cup olive oil

5 garlic cloves, minced

1 chunk ginger, minced

2 tablespoons dark brown sugar

4 to 5 pounds chicken wings

Whisk together the soy sauce, olive oil, garlic, ginger, and brown sugar. Pour over the chicken wings, and let marinate for at least 30 minutes (or overnight).

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Place the wings on a cookie sheet lined with aluminum foil (for easier cleanup), and bake for 45 minutes. Remove the wings from the oven, flip them over, and bake for about 40 minutes longer.

These wings are delicious at any temperature and tend to draw kids from other families to join you. They are like catnip at a sporting event.

You can bring a pasta salad or cut-up veggies and fruits and you have a well-balanced meal. Just pack a lot of napkins because the wings are messy.

DINNER WITH ADOLESCENTS

Adolescence is a time of exploration in the context of ongoing connection with the family. Kids are discovering new music and new friends, experimenting with their sexual identities and their appearances, but still using home as their touchstone.

Family researchers have identified several features of successful parents of adolescents. They are interested in their kids’ journeys and want to learn about their kids’ new discoveries; they are tolerant of strong expressions of feelings; and they are willing to talk in a more honest and self-disclosing way about their own lives, if these disclosures are relevant to their kids’ struggles.⁶ This is also a time when kids are figuring out who they are and how they want to be similar to and different from their parents. It’s no wonder then that this is a time when kids may declare that they have food preferences that are unlike those of their parents. Consider the New Yorker cartoon of two teenage girls talking. One says to the other: “I started to be a vegetarian for health reasons, now it’s just to annoy!” Or conversely, my son Joe started cooking meat when he was about thirteen, an act that simultaneously delighted his father and differentiated him from me.

How to Keep Dinner as Lively as Your Teenagers

Some of the following suggestions may fall flat as a pancake. Others might only get you a few more minutes of conversation at the table. Still others might not work the first or second time you try them. When it comes to parenting teens, persistence pays off—so does having a thick skin when your teen rolls his eyes at you. Don’t let a little pushback or negativity keep you from trying again.

• Agree that dinner is off-limits for discussing conflicts—no talk about homework, whose turn it is to take out the trash, a recent D on a math quiz, or how late curfew should be on Friday night.

• Eliminating dicey content, however, will not eliminate all conflict at the table. Most teenagers can find things to wrangle about no matter how friendly the topics of conversation seem to you. My kids often got into tussles with one another over who was taking up more physical space at the table. Teenagers can get fights going over the size of a plate or the tone of your voice. Try asking everyone to hit the pause button: “Let’s all take a deep breath or step away from the table for a minute.” Alternatively, you can ask your child if there is anything that’s irritating him or making him feel prickly at the moment, other than the color of the drinking glasses. Assure him that you really are interested.

• If possible, parents as well as teens should make dinner a technology-free zone. If this isn’t possible, then negotiate rules that everyone can agree to, such as: “We’ll only use our phones to resolve factual disagreements that come up at dinner.”

• If scheduling conflicts are interfering with dinners—what with sport practices, after-school jobs, hours of homework, and heavy social media upkeep—consider having a healthy after-dinner, take-a-break-from homework snack. This might be frozen yogurt with berries, a bowl of soup, or cheese and crackers.

• Initiate conversations about subjects that matter to all of you, such as an article in the newspaper that confused, upset, or delighted you. Talk about it and ask for your kids’ reactions.

• Tell a story about something that you struggled with during the day and invite your children to help solve a dilemma you faced, such as needing to give mixed feedback to someone at work, or sending an unintended email and having to repair the repercussions.

• Offer to make a new meal, based on your teen’s interests—if he is studying South African history or Indian literature, check out Epicurious.com online and search for recipes by country. Even better, make that new meal with your child so that she can teach you something about another culture she knows more about than you do.

• Invite your kid to make a course or part of the meal, particularly something fairly quick (but special and dramatic) that will elicit oohs and ahs from the rest of the family—popovers, bananas flambé, and fruit smoothies all do the trick.

• Speak about your own experiences of the day in a way that is honest and self-disclosing, perhaps revealing something that was embarrassing or challenging. Or repeat a joke that you heard at work.

• Create a weekly dinner ritual when your kids’ friends or family are invited to dinner or to dessert. For example, on a tired Sunday night, invite friends over to make sundaes.

• Ask your teen to choose music for you to listen to during dinner. On other nights, you might play your own music, or play the music that you listened to when you were your child’s age. This will also provide something interesting to discuss.

• Since adolescence is a time of increased exploration, buy cookbooks when you travel to new places, or ask for recipes at restaurants, or from people you meet. We love to make a meal that conjures up a trip to Italy—a pasta recipe from a friend we made in Rome who invited us to have this meal at her home (see box “A Recipe That Captures a Family Adventure”).

EMPTY-NEST DINNERS

Family dinners don’t stop when adolescents leave home. Some couples with an empty nest observe that dinnertime continues to be a placeholder, a time when they still feel connected to their kids as they eat a favorite family meal or say a blessing that they have said for decades. Some couples also report a newfound flexibility: “We can have dinner at nine o’clock if we like,” or “It’s so much easier to cook a meal without having to take into account my children’s food preferences.”

It took me years after my children flew the coop not to feel wistful around dinnertime, though at first my husband and I pretended that this new freedom was great. We sometimes had leftovers two nights in a row, something that would have elicited grumbles from our sons. Other times, we misbehaved like children, snacking on cheese and crackers until we lost our appetites for dinner. Eventually, we settled into a new rhythm of eating at more varied times of the night than we used to, and eating way down the food chain. My omnivore husband has inexplicably become a vegetarian three or four nights a week.

For some empty nesters, dinner can feel like an awkward time, as it is a poignant and nightly reminder that family life is forever changed. One couple found that they turned on the nightly news at dinnertime, a practice that was verboten when their children were home. They realized that with the TV on they were trying to find a substitute for the liveliness of their children’s conversation. With that insight, they decided to keep it on just when they were preparing dinner but would try to allow their own adult conversation to develop at the table.

WHEN YOUNG ADULT CHILDREN COME HOME

And, of course college kids and older ones continue to come home during vacations and school breaks. They may want you to prepare a sentimental favorite or they may be interested in what new dishes you’ve experimented with in their absence. Food is so synonymous with home that an adult child can experience a longing for home as a longing for a home-cooked meal. A friend of mine told me that she came home from work one day and could sense that someone had been in her kitchen, even though it was totally clean. She was right. Her nineteen-year-old son, a college sophomore, had let himself in because he yearned for a home-cooked meal. Turns out, he wanted the taste of a home-cooked meal, cooked by him.

Dinner with young adult children can also give a taste of a new shift in roles. When my son, Gabe, came home for the summer at age twenty-two, after graduating from college and taking a trip to Vietnam, I thought we would slide into the comfortable dinner-making patterns of his childhood. Instead, he took the lead in the kitchen that summer, and this has been the pattern ever since.

It began when he offered to teach me how to make the spring roll recipe that he had learned at the Hai Café cooking school in Hoi An, Vietnam. I offered to shop for the ingredients. With time short, I had to make several substitutions. Instead of taro root (which my son used gloves to handle in Vietnam so as not to develop an itchy rash), I got a turnip. Instead of choko, which I couldn’t find at the supermarket, I bought chayote from Costa Rica, a similar yellow squash. Instead of wood ear mushrooms, I got dried black trumpet mushrooms. Still, even with all these short cuts and western-izations, the spring rolls were the most delicious I had ever tasted. (See the recipe on page 43.)

Those spring rolls were just the start. Instead of the slapped-together roast chicken that I made throughout his childhood, the epitome of comfort food, Gabe has figured out how to butterfly a chicken. I still don’t know how to do this, but I can attest to the results: The chicken is far juicier than my old-fashioned roast chicken.

During my sons’ growing up years, I was usually the one trying new things in the kitchen. Now the roles are reversed. Perhaps, part of the compensation for having children leave home is that sometimes they return, willing to share their adventures with us.

SPRING ROLLS, HOI AN STYLE (FOR 4)

(Adapted from the Hai Café Cooking School, Hoi An, Vietnam)

1 cup finely chopped vermicelli noodles, softened in cold water

⅓ pound shrimp, sliced down the middle and then cut in half

1 cup finely chopped black trumpet mushrooms, softened in warm water

1 cup julienned green beans

1 cup thinly diced shallots

1 cup finely grated carrots

1 cup finely grated chayote

1 cup finely grated turnip

1 large egg yolk

1 pinch salt

1 pinch pepper

½ cup vegetable oil (not more than 1 inch deep in frying pan)

1 packet 8.5-ounce round rice paper sheets, softened in water. (You need 1½ sheets for each roll.)

In a large mixing bowl, combine the noodles, shrimp, mushrooms, beans, shallots, carrots, chayote, turnip, egg yolk, salt, and pepper; mix well.

Place 1 sheet of rice paper on the counter, and then put half of another sheet on the part closest to you. Place about 2 tablespoons of the mixture on the paper that has double thickness. Then roll it up, taking care to tuck in the sides as you roll. Repeat to use the entire filling, which will make about 12 spring rolls. Prick each roll with a fork to help them cook well.

Heat the oil in a large frying pan. Place the spring rolls into the oil; turn once when they are golden on one side. Remove from the pan, and drain on paper towels. Serve with Fish Sauce.

Fish Sauce:

2 tablespoons bottled fish sauce

1 teaspoon crushed garlic

1 teaspoon finely chopped jalapeño chili pepper

1 teaspoon sugar

1 tablespoon lime or lemon juice

Combine all the ingredients in a small bowl and mix thoroughly until the sugar dissolves.

DINNER WITH OLDER FAMILY MEMBERS

For a variety of reasons, it’s increasingly difficult for elderly people to eat well. But eating well is just as important at this stage of life as it is for the young. In fact, eating well may be the single best predictor of being able to live independently.

There are many physical changes associated with aging that alter our relationship to food. Between the ages of sixty and eighty our sense of taste and smell decrease. Because older people also have decreased sensitivity to the sensations of hunger and thirst, they sometimes forget to eat or stay hydrated. The threshold for taste rises with age, so older eaters often need more flavor and seasonings to enjoy their meals. Appetite also takes a hit when a frail or mostly sedentary person lacks the energy to participate in physical activity. And the reverse is true too: With less food, people have less energy for activity. One change that might expand the options for older eaters is that sensitivity to disgust wanes with age. Maybe by the time I turn eighty, my sons can take me out on the town for a dinner that features raw eggs with uncooked pork sausage, a dinner that now makes me want to gag.

Elderly people’s living situations can contribute to diminished eating. In general, married couples eat better than singles. Perhaps, when you have someone to share your meals with, it’s easier to remember to cook—and to want to eat. Living alone—like two-thirds of women and one-third of men over the age of seventy-five—correlates with skipped meals. Assisted living facilities that provide healthy food and opportunities to eat with others can create a new kind of family dinner. Many elderly people I’ve worked with tell me that the best part of moving into a retirement community is that they don’t have to cook anymore and they never have to eat alone.

Given that with age comes a dimming of taste and smell, it’s the pleasing appearance of the meal and the way it evokes memories of food and family that will stimulate appetite. When you’re cooking for elderly relatives or friends, it’s good to pay special attention to the color of foods and to the evocative power of a dish to stimulate a sluggish appetite.

When my elderly father joined us for dinner, I tried to make foods that reminded him of happy memories. For example, I might make a baked apple, a favorite food from his childhood, or sweet potato pudding, a dish that evoked his wife (and my mother) who used to make this dish for every holiday. Even with the diminishing of taste buds in old age, food continues to be a source of great enjoyment. M. F. K. Fisher, a food writer, mused about the appetite during old age: “For many people, eating is the only pleasure left, as were the endless dishes and unceasing cups of wine to the aged Ulysses. . . . But, we must grow old, and we must eat.”⁷

At any age, it is the infusion of meaning that adds extra flavor to a meal. At infancy, the flavor comes from the warm feelings of closeness and attachment; for toddlers, the flavor is imbued through the fun of playing with food; for school-age kids, the boost to flavor comes from feeling more competent to participate in meal preparation; during adolescence, dinner is tastier when it is as much about being with the family as asserting a separate identity; with young adults the meaning often comes from being able to go home again, and sometimes in being able to teach your parents a thing or two.