Opposite Eaters

M is a great eater. Let me quote an email I sent from Paris last year:

As for the eatings, M is the only one who accomplished seven today. Here is what she ate:
1) Breakfast at the hotel (baguette, croissant, cheese, butter, scrambled eggs, bacon, hot chocolate)
2) Lunch at the Musee D’Orsay (mediocre packaged food)
3) Chocolate éclair (shared with me)
4) Coffee ice cream (shared with me)
5) Cheese plate (shared with me)
6) Onion soup
7) Dinner at Seraphin, a hip restaurant where she had Orangina, sweet potato terrine with ham and goat cheese (shared with S), chicken marinated in thyme and white wine with potato gratinee, tarte tatin and yet another cheese plate (both desserts shared with S).
Really.

M will try anything, and while she has a few reasonable dislikes (spicy food, shrimp, broccoli), she is pretty omnivorous. Which can be annoying.

A few years ago we were driving down the California coast from Jenner back to San Francisco and we stopped at Hog Island Oyster Company for--obviously--some oysters. At Hog Island you tell the oyster guys how many oysters you want, you pay, and they give you a tray with your oysters, a glove, a shucking knife, and a lemon. You take your tray out to the picnic tables by the water and you shuck (or rather, S shucks) and eat and borrow mango hot sauce from the oyster lovers at the next picnic table and watch the sea gulls dip over Tomales Bay. It doesn’t get much more idyllic--except when six-year-old M devours all the oysters before you even get back from the car with goldfish crackers for one-year-old E. Luckily, at Hog Island there are always more oysters.

E, on the other hand, as the previous anecdote hints, is not such a great eater (we don’t use the word picky only because we don’t believe in it). Here, from the same email, is what she ate the next day in Paris:

For parity’s sake, and for the record, here is what E ate today: breakfast at the hotel (some bites of scrambled egg, some bites of cornflakes and milk, half a croissant), an apple, a small croissant, another small croissant, a cinnamon-sugar crepe, a banana and an apple juice for lunch, a big croissant, another big croissant, rice and bread and milk for dinner, a bite of an apple.

E eats breakfast food, white food, dessert, and, luckily for our sense of parental responsibility, several kinds of raw fruit and vegetables. Also, E often chooses not to eat.

So it is with no small degree of embarassment that I, as a baker of Nigella chocolate cakes and the wife of a chef, must admit that we have now resorted to preparing plates of vegetables and noodles in shapes like flowers and faces for E’s dinner every night.

Appalling. But oh does she get excited, and then she just eats away!