Eating out

A lot of firsts lately! Luke has of course been to lots of restaurants with us, and we've often fed him his lunch from bottles or even baby food jars on these outings. Lately he has also started taking samples from mom and dad's lunches. (Last month's taste of dad's duck confit is a prime example.) But Luke has never just shown up at a restaurant without any food of his own and ordered his lunch from the menu -- until yesterday, his 10 month birthday.

The stage was set the weekend before last while visiting Grandma Sally, when we discovered that Luke loves grilled cheese sandwiches. (Yes, grandma J, we cut them up into little pieces; the photo above is staged.) So we decided we'd take him out for lunch to Zingerman's, the local famous sandwich and fancy foods joint, and order him the kid's grilled cheese.

It was an enormous hit. At home on a good day he'll eat maybe a third of a sandwich. But at Zingerman's he barely let mom and dad have a taste! Was it the white bread? (We use wheat at home.) The massive quantities of cheese? The fact that his sides-less meal was five bucks* and he could sense that mom and dad would be despondent if he didn't appreciate it? Further experiments will be necessary to tease out the crucial factor.

* Not to worry: Our nice neighbor recently gave us an extremely generous Zingerman's gift card as a thank-you for jumpstarting her car so she could get to work and (a couple of months earlier) saving it from being towed away on a football day, when our neighborhood turns into a circus and street parking is forbidden. So everybody's lunch plus a nice bottle of olive oil was free!