IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:What is it with these rubbish kids' menus in 'family' restaurants?
I CAN COOK a bit - well, that's the party line anyway. In truth, I can make chilli con carne and I can fry stuff. At one point I figured I should learn more about food, head to Ballymaloe and do a course and dazzle my friends. But the urge passed and now I have a steady relationship going with Donegal Catch and Heinz beans.
Food absorbs me - if I stop typing for a minute I'll go to the kitchen and find something to munch on. Yesterday, I ate: a full Irish breakfast, topped up with one daughter's portion of scrambled egg and toast; a lunch of two pieces of pitta bread filled with vegetarian sausage, onion and seafood sauce; a mid-afternoon slump-negating three Marks Spencer extremely chocolatey mini-chocolate rolls (you've got to try those, they're entering the pantheon of greatness with Tunnocks tea cakes), and two packets of King crisps; and a carb-laden dinner of half a large Dominos pizza with a handful of potato wedges and a slice of garlic bread. I've started training for a marathon and my appetite, obviously, has taken note.
That's just disgusting really and must look like blasphemy sitting on the Health pages. My point is that I am a pig and, although I fought my urges for a long time, now that I am exercising regularly, I can pig out without blimping out. The problems are many and obvious, but, bad habits being what they are, I don't care at the moment because I'm not outwardly gross and, as I'm going through an instant self-gratification phase, the long-term implications aren't impacting on my psyche.
However, even in my most bingey moments, I realise that I can't feed the kids like this and expect to get away with it.
Filling them up with chocolate provides them with happiness and me with peace for exactly the length of time it takes to consume whatever fat- and sugar-laden confection I have allowed them. After that, all hell breaks loose and the general level of minor squabbling between the two reaches frenzied, e-number fuelled proportions. But I hate cooking for them because they hate what I cook and so am willing to bring them out to eat as often as is affordable.
That's where the problems really start. You start off disregarding fast food chains because you're a sensible, responsible parent, and you will not supply these ruthless, morally vacuous multinationals with what I have heard are called "early consumers" and "lifers". You know that a taste for greasy buckets of chicken in childhood spells oozing pores and fat camp in adolescence.
You're obviously not going to bring them to Guilbauds, so you settle for the middle-of- the-road, legendarily typical "family" restaurants, the doors of which you haven't darkened since your own childhood.
There you can choose from a mind-numbing selection of pasta and pizza, and the kids can pick from the kiddies' menu which will have sausage/ chicken nuggets/pizza slice/ burger and chips, choice of fizzy drink, ice cream and jelly, and a paper menu to colour on.
I may be lacking in ideas in the kitchen, but these kips make me look like Jamie Oliver on a healthy dose of amphetamine. Come on, we've had a good decade of touting ourselves as worthy of recognition for our personal style, culture and flair on the back of our economic good fortune and all our restaurateurs can think of to feed our kids on is the same minking stodge we consumed 30 years ago.
I'd rather go into Mackers, because at least it's honest and reasonably priced, and you can park your guilt by having the kids drop change in the swirly charity box thing they have by the counter. I recently left a "family" eaterie 50 quid lighter with just me and the two girls fed, and I still had to make sandwiches when we got home. Never again.
The thing is, both of my girls are good eaters. They're slow and they'll fight for the bad things in life, but with a bit of encouragement you'll get vegetables, fruit, fish, meat, eggs and even hummus down their necks.
My problem is coming up with the goods and then mustering the enthusiasm to convince them to eat it, which is why I'm willing to pay someone to do that for me occasionally. And they ingeniously suggest fish fingers. Often burned.
An oft-quoted statistic which I can't remember right now is how many restaurants fail in the first year. It's a high percentage. With all this talk of recession, many of them must be worried.
Maybe this fear might light a fire under the backsides of some of them to consider the novel idea of supplying a decent product, at a reasonable price.