Hosting through P143: Food

Food can be a crazy thing, but we have been blessed with host children who are not picky eaters, and actually are excited to try new things.  It probably helps that a lot of our food around here is quite plain, and not too different from the food that they are used to eating.  Still, there have been some fun surprises and things we’ve learned along the way.

Having tea has been a big deal.  Tea in the afternoon or evening was a very calming thing for all of our host children.

Pickles!  They all loved pickles!  Our first daughter even loved drinking the pickle juice.  They also liked other food that was pickled, like eggs, and other pickled vegetables.

All of our host children loved meat, especially lunch meat like salami or bologna, and our Latvian girls loved sausages, too.  Our Latvian girls were also crazy about cheese; it was one of their favorite snacks, and we always tried to have some cheese along with us when we left the house.

It’s no secret that I’m not a big fan of ketchup.  Ever since my preschool years ketchup has elicited a nasty uncontrolled response deep down in my soul.  I can barely even wash dishes with ketchup on them.  But all of our host children have LOVED ketchup.  Ketchup is a big deal and is used in great quantity at every meal.  With our first host daughter, I thought she was probably just one of those kids who liked to overuse ketchup, like the kids in my first grade class at school when I was a kid who put ketchup on bread and ate it, or ketchup on crackers.  But then I learned that our neighbors who were also hosting from Ukraine had kids who were also crazy about ketchup.  Then our Latvia girls came, and they were even MORE obsessed with ketchup.  Ketchup on noodles.  Ketchup on vegetables.  Ketchup everywhere!  To seal the deal, when the chaperone came to stay with us for a week last winter, even she put great quantities of ketchup on all of her food:  pasta, potatoes, everything!  Ketchup is obviously part of the culture of Eastern Europe!  Who knew?  I actually considered purchasing ketchup in bulk quantities for this hosting, but my husband said that was ridiculous and messy.

By all means, one of the most delightful parts of being hosted was getting to eat lots of fruit.  The amount of fruit we went through on a daily basis was absolutely astronomical.  Bananas!  Apples!  Kiwi, Pomegranate, oranges, grapes, strawberries, blueberries . . . they loved it all, and we were happy to have them eating something so nutritious.

One of my favorite things that our Latvian girls loved was rye bread with Nutella for a treat.  I had never been a fan of rye bread before, but dark rye bread with Nutella is absolutely scrumptious.  I have a couple of Nutella jars in stock waiting for our girls to arrive again.  Rye bread is a very important food in Latvia, and lucky for us, last time our girls came with a loaf of rye bread for a gift, so we were able to try Latvian rye bread.  It was astounding.