I Give My Kids The Finger...Foods

When my wife and I are hanging out in the backyard with our sons and they randomly decide they are hungry (and let’s be clear, being hungry is a decision for a six and seven year old, otherwise they wouldn’t claim to be stuffed halfway through a plate of chicken and vegetables and become ravenous for ice cream five minutes later when you get in the car) we tend to go with finger foods. I’m not including recipes here because, one: this is not that kind of blog and, two: I don’t have any. I’m just saying that a couple factors combine to make finger foods ideal for myself and my family during the summer.

First of all, there are no utensils required. In fact, you even reduce plate usage. You can just heat up a big pile of chicken nuggets and drop them on the picnic table and little hands will begin snatching them up right before your eyes. A bit of advice: get your own hand clear of the plate as soon as possible to avoid getting bitten. I usually come out with the plate behind my back, then after I set it down, I get distance and act like the food appeared out of nowhere.

“Look, kids, somebody brought out chicken nuggets!”

While the feeding frenzy ensues, I get about twenty minutes of floating by myself in the pool. I can even lengthen this by using the whole you-need-time-to-digest technique.

Another reason finger foods work for us is because we have boys. Boys their age tend to hang out with other boys. So when they have friends over, my wife becomes so chromosomally outnumbered that the caveman style of eating becomes acceptable. Sure, girls can enjoy finger foods, but when you think about the staples (buffalo wings, potato chips, Cheetoes, giant turkey legs) the imagery naturally leads one’s mind to the Viking feast more than it does to the ladies bridge tournament at the country club. In fact, when you see my sons and their friends devouring chicken nuggets, pizza and watermelon, this metaphor will be pretty obvious.

Allow me to add here that even if your children are no longer in diapers, baby wipes prove invaluable in these situations. Whether eating sans utensils in the yard, in the car or dealing with a kid who would rather use his shirt than a napkin, the baby wipe is a necessary weapon in the war that is feeding children.

The final reason I have for leaning toward finger foods is that they are fun. Any food that you can employ the trained seal technique of eating with is okay in my book. I love throwing a small bite-sized foodstuff item into the air and catching it in my mouth. I’ve found in recent years that I never truly appreciated the cheese ball in my youth for this fact. It’s light, perfect shape for tossing in the air (either straight up for yourself or across the room for a friend) and packs a satisfying crunch upon a successful reception.

While I took the cheese ball for granted all these years, I did highly value other foods. During my early teenage years when I was too old to use my imagination without embarrassment and too young to drive a car to get somewhere, my cousin and I would spend a lot of time watching MTV. I’m not afraid of dating myself by admitting this was back when MTV actually showed music videos all day. In fact, some people out there may be surprised to know that the M in MTV stands for Music. Anyway, when boredom set in, we would look for snacks and the snacks would sometimes lead to further boredom fighting activities.

One day in particular, we found a bag of marshmallows. This immediately turned into a round of tossing them from one couch to the other into each other’s mouths. But this proved to be too simple for the two of us. The toss and catch aspect quick mutated. Before we knew it, we were standing in various rooms of his house competing in full contact food wars. We were bouncing the marshmallows off the walls and the kitchen table and diving, sustaining many a rug burn, in order to catch them.

Once the whole bag of marshmallows was gone, much to my aunt’s later astonishment, boredom took over again. But the point is that these finger foods, in the hands of two young men, actually provided more than just calories. They provided a brief period of entertainment.

As I finish typing this post, my sons and their friends sit at the table with me, eating cut up fruit, chicken nuggets and Kool-Aid. They act out small scenes where the nuggets are small animals or fish and they are larger predators who decimate the once great population of the smaller species. This is a successful and low stress way to feed and entertain all these monsters. Dishes used: 2. Kids fed: 5 (including me).