Dissection Dinners

Kids these days don't seem to want to eat anything other than burgers, pizza and chips/fries. It can be a real struggle to get them to widen the taste-spectrum of their palate, especially when real food has to contend with the likes of Dino-Bites (processed chicken in breadcrumbs, shaped to look like dinosaurs) and even the ubiquitous fish-finger (how do they ever survive in the wild? Sure, the coating of breadcrumbs would keep them warm in the freezing depths of the ocean, but they don't even have heads. That's just not right. But maybe it does explain how fishermen manage to catch them in droves).

So, in order to compete with the proliferation of novelty, pre-packaged, pre-processed kid foodstuffs, we have to start getting a bit more creative ourselves. Originally, I had envisioned a scoop for mashed potatoes that (with a sort of scissors-action) actually clamps two halfs of a mould around the potato-mush and thus delivers a pre-formed Spudzilla onto the child's plate. "Do you want one monster or two?"

To the child, suddenly the plate becomes a minature battleground. See how Spudzilla towers imperiously above the lowly peas, and scoffs at the humble carrot slices that cower at the side of the plate. Boiled by a particularly fortuitious kitchen-lightning strike, Spudzilla, in a fit of wrath at his erstwhile creator, picks up said carrot slices, and throws them, frisbee-like, at the child. All he can do is catch them in his mouth, and dispose of them by chewing and swallowing. Aaagh! Now he's picked up that Asparagus Spear! My only defence is to eat him, one limb at a time!

With the imaginary drama over, the kid is left with an empty plate, a full belly, and a couple of bemused parents who'll never tell him to stop playing with his food ever again. And of course this could be taken one step further, for slightly older kids.

Offal is dirt cheap. Hearts, livers, kidneys - cooked properly, they're actually quite tasty. But most kids won't touch them, just because they sound disgusting. Possibly because we don't have any dissassociative names for them like "bacon", "chop" or "steak". Or "haggis", for that matter. Anyway, here's where things get all educational, as well as edible. Imagine a mashed potato mould for the human body that comes in two halves. Fill the bottom half with mashed potato, then insert small chunks of offal in their correct anatomical positions. Slivers of liver about the midrift, two little chunks of kidney in the appropriate locations - maybe even a nugget of lamb's heart in the upper right portion of the chest cavity. Gravy vein structures might require a little more work, but could also be doable.

Plonk the second half of the mashed-potato mould over the first, and serve a steaming-hot virtual cadaver to your kids. Now that I've set it down in black and white, the educational value of this idea is kind of outweighed by the "my kid's going to turn into Hannibal Lecter" factor. "I ate his liver with a vintage Ribena and some Heinz Baked beans..."

Maybe I should have stuck with the potato monsters. At least they would have been more easily baked.