The Papaya Personality.

It's hard to cook for a family; everyone has their likes and dislikes, some of which appear to be entirely random. I've many times wondered if the kids decided one day that they needed a personality of some sort, and that the best way to have a personality would be to like or dislike a kind of food.

It's easy to create a personality, after all. I've done it lots of times. I invented a new signature for myself when I was 19. I read an article about how people with flourishes and flashy signatures are optimistic, energetic people. I wanted to be optimistic and energetic, too, but that's a lot of work, always being upbeat and doing stuff. So instead of becoming optimistic and energetic and hoping my signature followed suit, I sat down for about a half-hour and worked out a new signature with flourishes and doohickeys and things, and once I had that down, I assumed that the optimism and energy would ultimately result.

I also made myself a fidgeter because a long long time ago, I read that fidgeting can burn up to 800 calories per day. Ever on the lookout for a way to work out without actually exercising, I decided that fidgeting would be a good way to go, so I learned to fidget -- and not just any old fidgeting, but cross-training fidgeting: I tap my heel, I bend paperclips, I go get coffee, I go dump out my coffee because the coffee we make in our office is god-awful terrible, I bend more paperclips.

The Fidget Workout (Copyright ME) is only one of the many workouts I've invented in my life in hopes of, like I said, not actually exercising. I used to be quite the exerciser; in my 20s I worked out 5 or 6 days per week. Now, I watch How I Met Your Mother five or six days a week, and my "workouts" are not so much workouts as brief breaks from TV. I'm not as bad as those people who look up how many calories are burned doing laundry, but I'm well on my way down that path. My workout this summer has been something I call "Baby Workout" and involves-- try to follow this now -- taking the Babies somewhere and playing with them. That somewhere might be the living room, and it might be the park. To get them there, I put them in the stroller and walk and jog behind it, so that we arrive at the swingset (or the couch) with me gasping for breath and covered in sweat, and the Babies! confused, a little, at the way we sped up and slowed down to get there, and also at why I am leaning down with my head between my legs and dizzy.

So I have experience in creating workouts and personalities, and that's why I think the kids sometimes use food to establish a personality: because it's easier than learning about current events or having hobbies. Instead of being "the kid who reads nonfiction a lot," because that's boring and requires reading, they can be "the kid who likes bratwurst as a sausage but doesn't like bratwurst patties because they are round," which requires no work whatsoever. The Boy has tons of these kinds of quirks; he likes salami but only if it comes from the deli. He has to have "real" mayonnaise and swears he can taste the difference between that and Miracle Whip. He might be able to do that, but he can't tell the difference between deli salami and Oscar Mayer salami; I know because we just buy Oscar Mayer salami and put it in a deli bag. We even told him that's what we do, in an effort to convince him that there's no difference. He didn't believe us: "You wouldn't go to that much trouble," The Boy told Sweetie. But we would, and we do.

The kids also have no gray areas; everything has to be black and white with them. They can't just not be in the mood for something. They have to hate it. Make something they love for dinner, but they're just not hungry at the moment, and they hate it. We might order pizza for dinner, which they love, but they've been snacking and so they're not ready for dinner, and The Boy and Middle will both say "I hate pizza." Point out to them that they actually love pizza, that in fact they eat pizza for breakfast sometimes, that sometimes The Boy gets up late at night to come down and eat pizza, and they'll try to differentiate that.

"That was different," they say. Pressed to describe the difference, and they'll hit on whatever the can. It was warm, they'll say or I only like cold pizza or That pizza had melty cheese; this doesn't. Random, ad hoc justifications that might as well be I was facing east when you ordered that pizza.

Faced with that, Sweetie and I soldier on and try to make things that are new or exciting or tasty, which is how one night we ended up having "Rachael Ray's Jerky Turkey Burgers With Papaya Salsa." The "Rachael Ray" cookbooks we have were my retirement gift to Sweetie when we finally hit the point where she could stay home with the kids all day; I gave her those cookbooks and a Rachael Ray food processor because she liked watching Rachael Ray's cooking show and was excited about being able to cook fancy meals. It didn't work out quite like we'd all hoped. One day trying to make meatballs, I broke the food processor. Then the Babies! learned to walk, taking away any freedom Sweetie used to have because walking Babies! are Babies! that are capable of walking into their playroom, picking up the talking toy globe that they got for their first birthday, and walking back to the TV and hurling the globe at the TV, so walking Babies! are also "Constantly Supervised Babies!" Also, Sweetie went back to watching Law & Order reruns instead of Rachael Ray.

"Rachael Ray's Jerky Turkey Burgers With Papaya Salsa" is the official title of the recipe; in our house, it would not quite match up to that title. I made these for dinner a couple of weeks ago when I had some free time on a Saturday. I told Sweetie I would make dinner, and she asked what we were having. I read the title of the recipe to her, and said:

"We're having papayas!" I was very proud.

Sweetie asked: "Do they sell papayas?" she wondered.

"Sure," I told her, certain of it the way I'm certain of everything that I need to be true in my life, whether or not I actually know the answer. I'm certain even when I have no idea if I'm actually right.

"What do they look like?" Sweetie asked me, and I had to admit, I didn't know. I've never bought a papaya before. I guessed maybe they looked like a pineapple. "Are you sure?" Sweetie asked, but I wasn't, so I did what I always do when confronted with a question like this -- I googled it.

I google everything. I google anything that in a less-digital age I would have called one of my parents about. In the past, I'd ask my mom (who's a nurse) about various aches and pains or weird dizzy spells I'd had, or cooking questions, or child-rearing questions. I'd ask her those things even though my mom's answers to those questions was the same answer no matter what question I asked her: Drink more milk. It's like Mom works for the Milk Board. Call her up and say "I was out jogging with the babies and now my feet hurt real bad," and she'll say "Drink more milk." Call up and ask how to "saute" something, and she'll say "saute" is French for "drink the milk." When Sweetie and I were getting married, Mom left us a message that she had an idea for the reception; before I called her back, I was pretty sure that it would be to have all the guests drink milk.

I never asked Dad for as much advice as Mom's, because when I ask Dad for advice, the answer begins straightforwardly but works its way around, eventually, to one of Dad's three main topics of conversation: Social Security, gambling, or how he's going to move down South because it's cheaper to live there. I never, ever say that Dad might not need to live somewhere so cheap if he'd just gamble less. Eventually, Dad probably will move down South, where he'll move in next to a casino that cashes Social Security checks, so he'll have hit the conversational equivalent of the Unified Field Theory.

Luckily, I don't need to call my parents for advice like that because I can now just google it, like I google everything, and like I googled "papaya" that Saturday to find out what one looked like. I was unimpressed with it; it looked a lot like a watermelon on Atkins, a skinny elongated pear that looked boring. Tropical fruit shouldn't look boring. The tropics are exciting; fruit from the tropics should be exciting. If I'm going to have something with papaya in it, I want the papaya to look exotic. It should have had stripes, or spikes, or maybe little arms and legs so it could dance around singing some sort of catchy reggae song.

But I knew what one looked like, so I went and got that and the rest of the ingredients and came home to cook up the Jerky Turkey burgers with Papaya salsa only to learn that most of my ingredients were banned from our household because of e coli scares; specifically, Sweetie saw me getting ready to chop up the jalapeno pepper I'd bought and ruled it out because at the time, jalapeno peppers were the suspect in an outbreak of e coli. I tried to reason with Sweetie using various argument tactics:

First, I pointed out that it was only one jalapeno, and that it was very unlikely that there'd be much risk in one jalapeno.

When that didn't work, I said that I'd be cooking the jalapeno, which would kill any of the e coli germs in it. (I said that despite being completely ignorant about whether that was, or was not, true; again, I don't need to be right to be certain about something.)

That didn't work, either, so I tried resorting to definitions. "It's a JERKY burger," I said. "That means it's hot. It has to have the jalapeno or the recipe's wrong."

Still nothing, so I ended by pointing out that the e coli hadn't even killed anybody yet. I knew by then that I'd lost the argument; when your thesis in an debate is based on nobody has died... yet from doing whatever it is you want to do, you're not coming from a position of strength.

So we didn't have jalapenos for the burgers, but I forged ahead and made the Non-Jerky Turkey Burgers and while they were frying up, I tackled the Papaya salsa, which required that I cut up the Papaya, and I wasn't sure how to do that. I wasn't even sure which parts of the Papaya were supposed to be eaten or not.

That happens every single time I buy new fruit and it's why I mostly stick to apples and bananas, and why I even more mostly stick to Doritos and the like: It's far less confusing to eat a BBQ Ranch Frito than it is to eat a pomegranate. A bag of Cheetos is easy to eat; the bag is inedible, everything else is fair game. But cut open a pomegranate, and I'm in a mystifying world of pulp and seeds and skin and meat and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be eating or cooking. Am I supposed to get the seeds out? I wonder. Nobody eats seeds, so get rid of them, I think, but then I remember Persephone eating six pomegranate seeds and having to stay in Hades forever, so then I wonder if I am supposed to be eating the seeds, but also, if I do, will I go to Hell? All that reading and schoolwork seemed so helpful at first, but, as usual, Greek mythology just messes everything up.

Fruit is confusing and cookbooks don't help. Chop up Papaya, they say, without telling me whether I'm supposed to peel it, or eat it with the peel, or core it, or something.

I finally opted to peel the Papaya and chop it up, then mixed it up with the other ingredients, and mashed it around, and created what turned out to be about 3 gallons of Papaya salsa. Papayas are not only confusing, they're big. I had four burgers, four buns, and an entire punch bowl of Papaya salsa, which I was putting on the table when Middle walked through the kitchen, saw the salsa and said "I don't like that."

Parents everywhere can say with me exactly what I said: "You've never had it."

Middle was not daunted. "I don't like what's in it."

I said: "You don't know what's in it."

Middle said "That thing you were chopping." When I said that she didn't know what it was I was chopping, she said "But I still don't like it."

We had the Nonjerky Turkey Burgers With Optional Papaya Salsa for dinner, and I had apparently used the right parts of the papaya, because I thought they tasted excellent. Sweetie assured me they were very good.

Middle mostly moved hers around on the plate and ended up eating almost nothing of it; even after she scraped off the Papaya Salsa I'd made her put on, she didn't eat the Nonjerky Turkey burger; it had apparently been tainted by contact with "that thing I'd been chopping", and she wanted no part of it. She ended up having a dinner consisting mostly of Cheez-Its. I tried not to be offended or upset: that's just her personality.







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