Glorious food tends
to cause a feeding frenzy

Robyn’s ’Hood
By Robyn McCloskey

Living on the East Coast, many people happily mark the passage of time by observing the wondrously ever-changing seasons. I happily mark the passage of time by observing the wondrously ever-changing foods that are readily available to me.
For instance, if I can get caramel apples, I know it must be fall. If I can get peppermint-stick ice cream, I know the holidays are upon us. If I can order a Shamrock Shake at McDonald’s, I know to soon beware of the Ides of March.
If it is Monday and I know that my husband and I will be dining at a particular restaurant that next weekend, I will go online and study the menu as if I’m cramming for med school. When John F. Kennedy Jr. had to take the bar exam for the third time he studied less. Trust me.
I then decide what I’m going to order. And when the day arrives and we’re on the way to the restaurant, I tell my husband what he’ll be ordering. He is never allowed to order what I order. That would defeat the purpose of tasting two entrees.
Fortunately my husband is a “foodie” too. Unfortunately we have lost out on many a romantic evening — both of us are so easily distracted by the Food Network. A lot of couples fantasize about winning the lottery and buying homes, cars, jewels and stuff like that.
We fantasize about building a food court in our basement. And our love of food has not been lost on our children. When the kids were younger, people often would comment on what good appetites they had, and wanting to know our secret.
Hmmmm . . . good question. When we thought about it, we realized we must have subconsciously triggered some sort of survival mechanism in their brains.
Dinner at our house usually would go a little something like this: About halfway through, one of us would ask the kids, “Hey, are you going to finish that?”
If the answer was “no,” I know a lot of parents would make the kids sit till they ate and lecture them about all the starving children in the world. Not us. No tough love, no lectures. One of us — but usually both of us — would swoop in, forks flying, and remove the food from their plates.
But it also became an unintentional form of reverse psychology. The kids soon consistently cleaned their plates. It got to the point that if one of them had to use the powder room during dinner, they’d take the plate with them, fearful the food would be gone upon their return to the table.
One fall day, my husband and I were in the car when we passed a farmer’s market and a sign announcing the arrival of their annual pumpkin ice cream.
“Stop!” I screamed.
“What??” my husband yelled, slamming on the brakes because he’d assumed I was saving us from an accident.
“Pumpkin ice cream is here!”
I sprinted into the store and breathlessly told the girl at the counter, “I’ll have a large cone with pumpkin ice cream, please.”
Scooper in hand, she took a closer at the near-empty five-gallon drum of pumpkin ice cream and tried to gently break the news. There wasn’t enough to fill a cone.
By this time my husband had caught up and was by my side. I gamely suggested that she give me the five-gallon drum and a spoon. I think my husband must have slipped her a twenty because she shrugged her shoulders and handed me the drum, along with a thin paddle spoon.
And there we sat outside the farmer’s market, my husband contentedly licking his vanilla fudge swirl cone, and me ecstatically scraping the sides of the five-gallon drum of pumpkin ice cream with my little wooden paddle.
Food can make you do the strangest things. ••
Robyn McCloskey’s column appears each week in the Northeast Times. She can be reached at crmccloskey@verizon.net