My journey

Food is great - I love food, healthy food, less healthy food, snacks - you name it I probably like something about it. Looking back 14 years or so I didn't much like food.  Sure I ate plenty, but in general eating was what you did because you had to and, while I had my favourites I rarely got excited by food.

I was a vegetarian - not due to ethical reasons (good on you if you are) but because I didn't like meat.  Taste, texture, smell (oh god the smell) - it all turned my stomach.  Being a vegetarian was not why I didn't like food,but my nervousness about what I would try was. 

My husband loves to tell the story of how be 'broke me' by spending most of a day with an M&S chicken sandwich telling me to eat the chicken.  Eventually, for a quiet life I gave in and agreed it was ok. From that point on slowly but surely I started to include meat in my diet, but it had to be cooked just right and you could not even think of serving me rare steak.

R ended up working for an organisation where there was a lot of travel and he would eat out at lot of fancy restaurants and come back with loads of ideas, the slowly but surely we would try.  We got more adventurous and tried lots of new dishes, at home and in restaurants, and it was great.  We screwed up, a lot of what we tried to make, but we learned. We experimented, we tried and we grew as people. We have eaten at  some awesome restaurants and had some truly marvellous food experiences

Cooking shows, always a slightly guilty pleasure, have fuelled our desire to keep growing and developing and now we get the chance to try and share our love of food and cooking with our small person.  We discovered early on that what would help as background noise when settling B when he was super small was the background noise of a cooking show,and we have kept that up so that some of his limited TV is a cooking show just before bed.  

There is nothing more special than hearing his little voice tell us excitedly that he thinks that looks super tasty and he would like to eat it one day.  I hope that we manage to keep this excitement and love alive for him,  Of course I would also like it if he was a better eater, but not many parents wouldn’t

What I’m going to put here is unlikely to be a lot of the fancier things that get made, but probably a lot more about what we managed to get B to eat and the trials and tribulations of dealing with a toddler