Ambassador for Pizza

Upon returning from Massachusetts over Thanksgiving weekend, we order a pizza for lunch. After watching Fiona struggle to fold her slice just like Mommy and Daddy (she keeps folding along the wrong axis, leading to something like a pizza sandwich as opposed to a grease delivery system), I decide to instill my daughter with a little home city pride:

Daddy: You know, you're very lucky to be able to get New York pizza right at home. A lot of other places don't have pizza this good.

Fiona: Who doesn't have good pizza?

Daddy: Well, San Diego pizza isn't very good because they don't do the crust right. Or at Tia and Tio's down in Florida. (Suddenly realizing I probably shouldn't be slamming the in-laws restaurant options too aggressively to an impressionable child) They cook other things well in those places, but not pizza.

Fiona: Why not?

Daddy: They don't know how to make pizza well in those places.

Fiona: I'll show them how!

(pause)

How do you make pizza?

Please Don't Bother Me When I'm Working

Price Points

One game Fiona likes to play is "Grocery Store." She has a toy shopping cart which she likes to fill up with toy food, clothes, books, and any of the various plastic doodads that a preschooler accumulates over the years (grocery stores in her world apparently sell just about everything). She fills the cart up in the living room and then pushes it back to the office to go to the checkout line.

One of our local stores has recently added self-scanning, which is pretty much the only line we use any more. So Fiona has seen us scanning items to put in the bag and has even tried doing it herself once or twice (we draw the line at letting her scan the eggs). Each time an item scans, a generic soothing female voice announces the price: "two dollars ninety-nine cents."

As Fiona "scanned" her toy groceries this morning, she announced the price for each one. "3 dollars, 99 cents"; "8 dollars, 99 cents"; "10 dollars, 99 cents". Each item cost a certain number of dollars... and 99 cents.

Seems like she's already figured out how prices get set in the real world.

Recipe Hunting

I've posted some photos here in the past of Fiona helping out with cooking. She's baked cookies and helped her mother bread eggplant for eggplant parm. She loves helping out and is constantly trying to help us out in the kitchen with everything from pouring the dry pasta into boiling water to helping me roll out the dough for samosas (those wound up being a little heavy, as she was more energetic in her rolling than baking experts would advise). We do draw the line at handling raw meat, much to her chagrin.

With this interest in helping out in the kitchen has come an awareness that food has to be made, and a newfound curiosity in how that food is made. So we're constantly answering questions (as briefly as possible) about how to make a sandwich, or pasta sauce, or whatever else happens to be on the plate.

Of course, being as young as she is, Fiona doesn't quite get the distinction between foods that have to be prepared and foods that come ready to eat. So we've had to answer questions such as "how do you make an apple?" where the answer is "you pick it off a tree."

We also get questions like "how do you make a pretzel" and "how do you make flour" which could get lengthy answers, but really all Fiona wants to know is "you open the bag." The idea of foodstuff being prepared elsewhere before it reaches the grocery store shelves is a little beyond her.

As is the notion (and I think this is typical for her age, since I certainly remember thinking the same way) that some foods aren't meant to be eaten on their own but need to be mixed. Once while baking she took a taste of flour and, no surprise, didn't care for the flavor. So now she considers flour to be among the yuckiest foods around, despite our telling her that you can't have a cookie without flour.

The biggest problem we're facing food-wise, however, are onions. Fiona will pick them out of any dish that has them, even if it's a minuscule piece she finds mixed into meatloaf or pasta sauce. And that is a frustration, since it's very hard to cook without onion, and unlike flour they do retain their original form even after being mixed in for cooking. She's not allergic, so we're fighting this one out.