My Compliments to General Tsao

Abbie visited her first buffet this afternoon, a good-sized Chinese place a couple miles from home. We want to expose her to as many different kinds of foods as possible now so that we can spend the next ten years or so saying “you used to love eating this” whenever she turns her nose up at something. A buffet sounded like a good place to give her a wide variety of food, plus we ate lunch late and were really hungry. Unfortunately we copped out and gave her a plate of mostly garlic bread and fruit, stuff we knew she’d eat. At least some of the fruit was new to her. We did give her a little bit from a broccoli and chicken dish and something called a Mongolian meatball. Genghis Khan must have found a pretty good meatball recipe while conquering most of the known world because Abbie enjoyed that round amalgam of mystery meat.

Generally when I go to a buffet I like to move nice and slow, graze if you will, to give my stomach time to talk to my brain. Body parts, like the fingers or the part of the foot directly touching a rock in the shoe, get a direct line to the brain to communicate quickly and repeatedly if necessary. The stomach, though, communicates with the brain much more slowly, possibly because it’s forced to use secondary roads where it ends up caught behind large farm vehicles, and can take up to 15 minutes to say “I’m full.” As championship-winning competitive eaters like Takeru Kobayashi could attest to, 15 minutes is plenty of time to pack in a painful amount of food. So I like to move slow and avoid overeating. This philosophy is not compatible with dining with a young child. You need to stuff your own mouth while the kid is content, and rest by feeding the kid when she starts fussing. So I ended up eating too fast, but I compensated by taking her with me while loading up my plate. That way I have to slow down to battle her for control of the serving spoon, and to keep her mitts out of the moo goo gai pan.

When we rose to roll our bloated stomachs out the door, I left a tip, something I wouldn’t have done at a buffet pre-baby, to help soothe the cleaning staff that would have to wipe up baby remnants. I think she enjoyed the trip: lots of new sights and tastes, a limitless supply of banana, and the prospect of receiving a fresh slice of garlic bread every time she threw an old one on the ground.