Hungry Monkey, Matthew Amster-Burton

A shamefully long time ago—I’m talking months—the marvelous Kelly at Bellani Maternity handed me a book as the kids and I were walking in to Tot Gym class. “Here,” she said, “I think you might like this.”

A book about parenting and feeding written by a stay-at-home foodie dad named Matthew? Why, yes, I might be interested in such a thing. Having read it, I can wholeheartedly recommend Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater if you are interested in at least two of the following three things:

• Parenting
• Food
• How awesome it is to live in Seattle

Parenting books that tell you what you should do kind of get on my nerves, especially when they’re written by non-experts, and especially when the five books on your shelf express five different strongly help opinions about THE ONE THING YOU MUST DO. Hungry Monkey is refreshing, because except for the recipes at the end of each chapter, Amster-Burton doesn’t give instructions or suggestions or even advice. He just tells you what he did, and how well it did or didn’t work. His goal was to raise a foodie like himself, an adventurous and eager eater, and to avoid “baby food” as much as possible. Since I love to cook, and since I badly want to raise children who love to eat and try new things and who will appreciate what I’m slaving over in the kitchen, this was a goal that I shared.

I do think that Iris Amster-Burton, the eponymous hungry monkey, was an unusually adventurous child, culinarily speaking, and mileage will vary widely. Our babies were much slower to take to “grown up” food, and we’ve had to be much more careful about milling or pureeing their food. (Julian, for instance, has a hair-trigger gag reflex, and if he gets too big a piece of food in his mouth, or if even a small piece of food ends up on the back of his tongue where he doesn’t expect it, BLEARGH.) I don’t think you should read the book as a road map and expect that your experience will be the same as the author’s, and it’s occasionally been a struggle for me not to be disappointed when the babies didn’t respond the way the baby in the book did, or when I don’t have time to get an elaborate home-cooked meal for the four of us on the table by 6:00.

Hungry Monkey‘s most important function (apart from being a very funny and enjoyable book with some delicious-looking recipes in it) is as a corrective to all of the other baby-feeding advice out there. I was especially tickled to read his skewering of Ruth “Super Baby Food” Yaron, a best-selling author with no qualifications as a nutritionist or pediatrician whose “bland is best” diet would have parents milling their own goddamn grains. (I mean, is there anything more “Stuff White People Like” than milling their own cereal? For cripes sake.) The feeding philosophy of Hungry Monkey is, basically, “Dude, just feed your baby,” and having Amster-Burton’s sarcastic and carefree voice in the back of my head has been therapeutic.

Despite my plans to feed the babies only homemade, delicious, flavorful food from my own kitchen, we’ve ended up dividing their meals roughly into one-third homemade baby food, one-third grown-up food (either off of our plates or run through the food mill or food processor), and one-third store-bought. We’ve had the best luck with Plum brand baby food, which comes frozen and actually tastes pretty good when heated up. Their favorite flavor is their Vegetable Stew with Beef, but since we want to raise polite and respectful children, we’ve been referring to the beef stew by its full name, Beef Stewart. (Likewise, George Squashington and Yogertrude.)

Despite my initial scoffing (scoffery?), we’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of Annabel Karmel’s Top 100 Baby Purees. I’ll whip up a batch every week or so and store it in Baby Cubes in our downstairs freezer. I honestly thought I wouldn’t need to look at a recipe to figure out how to steam some vegetables and put them in the food processor, but Karmel’s suggestions for good combinations really are both creative and helpful. My one criticism is that her indications of how many servings a given recipe will produce seem wildly off. A recipe that claims to make 4 servings will generally work out to a tray and half or more of Baby Cubes. (I do play a little fast and loose with the quantities, but not by that much.)

As for “real food,” it’s been really exciting to see what they’ll eat and enjoy. Generally speaking, when we have leftovers nowadays, instead of putting them in the fridge for lunch the next day, I’ll run them through the food mill or the food processor and stick them in the freezer in cubes. Julian and Eloise have gobbled up mushroom risotto, smoked salmon chowder, three-bean chili, chana masala, pasta with tomato sauce, and probably more things that I can’t think of. They’ve happily and eagerly snacked on pieces of quesadillas from Whole Foods. They love pickles and plums (not necessarily together). There aren’t that many foods they don’t seem to like, to be honest. They’re not wild about summer squash or chicken, but I think our sample size is too small to draw any definitive conclusions.

As much as we try to broaden their palates and provide them with variety, the twins are babies, and I think they would happily eat Happy Baby Puffs and applesauce for every meal—at various times we’ve had to institute moratoria on both foods to try to convince them to eat ANYTHING ELSE. They have essentially the same breakfast every day (oatmeal and yogurt with some kind of fruit) and don’t seem to mind. But as they get more comfortable with chewing, and get a few more teeth, and as their hand-eye coordination improves, I think mealtimes are going to get more and more fun. I think I’m looking forward to a time when they can express an opinion about what they’d like to eat, even when we enter the inevitable “nothing but macaroni and cheese” phase.

Anyhow, Hungry Monkey is a great book and a quick read, and I’m very grateful to Kelly and Bellani for giving to me. You should all, like, go there and spend a lot of money, or something.

Filed under Parenting | Tags: books, food, reviews | Comments (4)