Am I a Man, or a Garbage Can?

PJ O'Fudgenukkers, Brooklyn Style

One thing that calorie counting will teach you awfully fast: portions are stupid large. They've been large so long that we don't recognize them as large anymore. Look at the plates and bowls and cups from the my parents only 40-odd years ago, and they were noticeably smaller. Now that I'm a parent, those portions are now even growing larger, due to the "I am my own kid's garbage can" phenomenon....

THEY sit there, five little pasta shells, nestled in a shallow bath of melted butter and Parmesan: the remains of dinner for my toddler son and daughter. I cannot help myself. I reach over, grab the pink plastic bowl and scoop a bite into my mouth. At that moment, I realize something has gone terribly wrong.

The NY Time's Dining & Wine piece is all about the struggles of dads with little kids, vacuuming up their left over kiddie portions in the face of trying to keep a cap on their own eating. There are various quotes from what are referred to as "daddy bloggers", which gave me the kinda heebie-jeebies that a spoiled Jewish teenager from Long Island gets when someone off-handedly mentions JAPs.

Yeah, I'm a daddy blogger. Kiss my tuchus!

The piece is a fairly standard exploration of the challenges of living with and feeding a person with the tastes of a child -- sugar this, fried that, cheesy pleasey, and damn the cholesterol. To a certain extent, if you have an adult palate, your child will not always want to eat what you are eating but if you don't have a fully adult palate (and who does?), the temptation of high-calorie, high-taste food every day will be hard to turn away.

Even before I started counting and restricting my calories, I haven't been too tempted to eat Edie's foods, with the exception of the conveniently microwaved chicken nuggets. However today, I did act as Edie's trash can, but....it was a good thing, thanks to the restaurant I was in.

Today, me n' the kids spent the day in Brooklyn Bridge Park with a friend and her toddler, and she recommended a restaurant that she heard was kid-friendly, just up the street from the playground on the butt-end of Atlantic Avenue.

Come for the play-space, stay for kids leaving you alone while in the play space.

The Moxie Spot trumpets "Family, Fun & Food" on it's sign prominently, which immediately got me thinking of the Republican Convention currently going down in Florida. How much retrograde, religiously inclined insanity is defended in the name of "family, fun & food values"? To me, "family restaurant" is code for "crappy food, noisy room". But it looked near empty, so that was a plus.

Family Values runs on cheesecakes. Subservient, God-fearing cheesecakes.

Spacious, lots of wood, we ordered at the counter, they brought the food to us. A play area was near by, and a 2nd floor is a complete play area, too. Menu was standard fried stuff/pastas/pastries, with a healthy number of kids portions. The first thing I noticed was that the prices for everything, including the adult stuff, was kinda low for the neighborhood. Hmmm. The kids bopped at the coloring table, and when the food came, it was surprisingly good and...modestly portioned. Rather than sell you a standard jumbo burger for $12, here was what a burger usually was like 40 years ago, about half the size...for about half the price!

This past weekend in the Northfork, Edie begged us into submission was treated to ice cream every day because vacation days are "special days." It really annoyed me that one particular shop had no kid's size, just a "small" which was easily 12 oz, which is a large at a standard fancy-pants place in Manhattan. But here, my adult-sized burger & onion rings was pleasantly dinky, which allowed me to....hoover up most of the fries in Edie's kid's hot dog combo plate without the guilt wracking all the other "daddy bloggers" in the NY Times.

The place was quiet today, but I'd have to assume on the weekends the Moxie Spot is more jammed up than the "escort services" at the current Republican convention. Still, on a Daddy Blogger scale of one to five diapers, the Moxie Spot gets 4 1/2, discounted a half a diaper for the anemic pickle on my burger. Kids love pickles, but adults love good pickles.

Tomorrow, delving in to the dark heart of daddy blogging.

THE COUNT: 2,305
Last night was a struggle, got really hungry after I went to bed around 11pm. When I travelled around Europe as a student for a few months on a very limited budget, I went to bed hungry many nights, and when I got home my parents were happy/concerned with how thin I looked. The happy/concerned look of my long-gone parents got me through the night with out snacking.

AM SNACK: 7:30am, iced green tea, 25 cal

BREAKFAST: 8:30am, fruit smoothie, 350 cal

AM SNACK: 11am, momma salad, 90 cal

LUNCH: 1pm, burger, onion rings, fries, diet coke, +/- 1000 cal
Felt like a grand. Could be wrong, but don't think so. I think I may have to play with weighing a meal without counting, eating it, guessing the calories then doing the math.

DINNER: 6:45pm, grilled chicken breast, steamed green beans, baked potatoes, 7oz diet sprite,  840 cal