Peanut Butter and the Four Major Food Groups

My four-year old daughter Lily doesn't like peanut butter. This mystifies me. There are things about motherhood that are SUPPOSED to be hard (97.246% of the time is the latest average, I'm told). But feeding your child peanut butter when it's already 7 p.m. and you haven't had time to shop or cook isn't on the "hard" list.

Peanut butter in fact, was one of the four major food groups for me as a child, the other three being bologna, mac & cheese, and Oreos dunked in milk. I still don't understand those Oreo twister types. Peanut butter was the lunchbox standard of most of the kids in my school, with the only variant being whether someone had jelly, butter, or that glorious marshmallow fluff - yum! - on theirs.

Lest anyone start to disparage my own mother for her cooking skills, or apparent lack thereof, stop right now. My mom, truth be told, was a very good cook, and her repertoire extended well beyond the bolmacORpeanbut standards. Some of my best memories from my own childhood are inexticably intertwined with food. I'll never forget how she used to pick my little brother and me up from school on half days, take us home to a lunch of hot dogs, mac & cheese and peas, and then shuttle us to a matinee movie, clutching greasy brown lunch bags filled with homemade popcorn that we brought in ourselves.

Like any mom, it's important for me to imprint lasting, positive memories on Lily, and it seems one of the obvious ways to do that is through food. Things like making from-scratch, hand decorated cakes on her birthday or making sure the few cold nights we get here in Austin are accompanied by a steaming (for me) and tepid (for Lily) mugs of hot chocolate.

Come to think of it, I guess I can make food memories without the aid of peanut butter. But thank goodness she likes mac & cheese.