HOTCHPOTCH

It was a common term in house when Jackson was growing up. He had no interest in food whatsoever. When we started him on farex, he spat it out. Cucumber, tomato, strawberry, bits of apple, toast with vegemite, peanut butter, or honey, he spat it all out. Eventually he spat so much, he choked and vomited. His eating has kept my stress levels humming along at a not so nice pace for the last 23 years.

To put it in perspective, when he was four and we took him on his first cruise, he attended the kids club. One day, with forty-three kids in total, they went for ice-cream. He was the only, and I mean only kid that refused to eat the ice-cream.

We found a few trusted dishes over the years. My spag bolognese if I cooked it the same every single time worked. Change the recipe slightly, i.e. add in a bit more mushrooms and he was onto us and spat it out. Take him out to dinner, order spag bol, forget about it, one mouthful and he was out.

Up until he was eight, I cooked massive batches of food. It was good stuff – beef, chicken, or fish, with about nine different vegetables in stock. Portioned, stored and frozen in one heck of a lot of Tupperware containers. My cupboard was full of plastics.

This worked a treat, IF and only IF Simon mashed the living daylights out of it. One tiny lump and we were doomed. Jackson would gag, choke, and spat it out.

Simon would mash, I would inspect, Simon would mash, I would inspect, eventually we declared it ready for Jackson consumption.

As he got a bit older, we turned to hotchpotch. Jackson got excited about hotchpotch dinner. So, we ran with this for many years, even today it can work.

What is hotchpotch in our house? True to the meaning of hotchpotch, it was a motley assortment of things, none of which made sense. Not a meal, but a mish-mash, mingle-mangle, odds and ends of assorted food.

Jumbled and disorganized, with no structure. It was no steak and three veg, lamb shanks with mash, or roast meat with roast veges. Whilst it made no sense to us, to Jackson it made perfect sense. We were happy, as he was getting food into his little belly.

The winner was one chicken strip, two chicken nuggets, half a dozen chips with barbecue sauce (tomato sauce didn’t cut the mustard). Sometimes we could add a fish finger.

We got brave and added in five peas and two bits of carrot. They remained on his plate, but we kept trying. Mashed potato worked, but only if it were 150% lump free and it had to have the right mixture of butter, milk, seasoning and would you believe a squeeze of mayo.

Today, hotchpotch might be two party pies, three sausage rolls, two chicken nuggets and a few chips.

To be honest, we didn’t have a lot of combinations, we would run with what worked until it didn’t.

If we ran out of options, Maccas nuggets and chips was a good filler that worked.

Once for a bit, we were desperate. His school lunch came home every day. We bought a stack of cheeseburgers from Maccas and froze them. He would take one to the canteen at lunch time and ask them to heat it up…………it worked. We didn’t like it, but it was better than him going for days without food.

We were told he would grow out of it, at 23 this hasn’t happened, we were told not to worry, no kid in Australia starved, we still worried. So, hotchpotch remains a staple.

There was no logic schmogic to it, but there was no denying that hotchpotch worked.