Michael loves pasta. His diet largely consists of pasta and pesto. My first mouthful of pesto only passed my lips when I was 19 years old and spent a summer as an au pair in Naples. I do wonder whether, if I’d paid a little more attention to the whole picking basil from the garden of their country house and sticking it in the blender with pine nuts and so on, I might have been Ireland’s answer to Nigella. I digress.  So intrinsic is pasta and pesto to the modern Irish child’s diet that when I went to Perugia a couple of weeks ago, it was to find that my cousin had brought pasta and pesto with her from Ireland to feed her children. She was a little defensive about this decision but it’s hard not to sympathise.
Anyhow at the supermarket Michael, took a packet of pasta from the shelves and clutched it to his bosom until we got to the check-out whereupon he briefly handed it to the cashier and then reclaimed it and carried it tenderly to the car.  “Mummy,†he said to me hopefully “me eat pasta after my dinner?â€
i sympathise with his defense&love of the pasta. atkins never stood a chance in my kitchen!
>She was a little defensive about this decision….
Defensive to whom? And why, exactly, did she feel the need to be defensive?
Pasta and pesto is still our staple meal for the kids. And mine absolutely LOVE raw pasta and eat it as a snack (along with still-frozen peas….)
in our house the wildly varied meals i’ve encouraged have been slowly replaced by simpler and simpler variations. we are now down to plain pasta. she will deign to have accompaniment as long as the items don’t touch.
michael sounds incredibly sweet.