Our 5-year-old, like most first borns, is a picky eater. He has all sorts of weird food rules relating to color, texture and temperature. (There’s nothing like a brown spot on an apple to throw him into a tizzy.)

Our 3-year-old has no food rules. (Well, one. He won’t eat baked potatoes. We don’t get it either.) But he will eat broccoli, squid, beets, avocado – you name it.

I’ve always wondered if their eating habits are a result of their starting points. I spoon fed our 5-year-old processed baby food out of a jar starting at 6 months, while I let our 3-year-old pick salmon off my plate when his fingers wandered there at 9 months.

(I like to think I was less worried about food allergies my second time around, but the truth was I was too tired to stand up and fetch him a jar. We make our third child hunt for her own food. Thankfully, she’s good at it.)

Now apparently there is some science behind my theory, and a movement called baby-led solids, where parents skip the puree phase. Intentionally.

[Gill Rapley, author of Baby-Led Weaning: Helping Your Baby to Love Good Food] argues that bypassing the spoon and the cereals and purees in the transition to solids puts children in control of their own feeding, a natural extension of on-demand breastfeeding, and that doing so leaves them less likely to be overfed and to have problems later with food and obesity. She also believes that allowing children to choose to experience a variety of tastes and textures leads to fewer battles during mealtime further down the road. — Babble.com

What do you think?

I, for one, feel better about being lazy.

Michael Pollen recently posted his twenty favorite food rules, as submitted by readers, and here are the two our family will try to follow:

“Don’t eat anything that took more energy to ship than to grow.” — Carrie Cizauskas

“Never eat something that is pretending to be something else; e.g., no “textured vegetable protein” or veggie burgers (fake meat), no artificial sweeteners, no margarine (fake butter), no “low fat” sour cream, no turkey bacon, no “chocolate-flavor sauce” that doesn’t contain chocolate, no “quorn.” If I want something that tastes like meat or butter, I would rather have the real thing than some chemical concoction pretending to be more healthful.” — Sonya Legg

To follow Rule #1, we must eat in season.  So yesterday, at the grocery store, we walked past the strawberries and blueberries, and bought a pumpkin, not to display on our front porch, but to eat.

We decided to make pumpkin lasagna. Studies have shown one pound of hamburger can contain meat from up to 400 cattle, some of which is treated with ammonia to kill bacteria, so in our effort to eliminate hamburger from our diet, we made our lasagna with sausage (because we all know how much healthier that is for you).

First, we made pumpkin puree.  Then, we made sauce for our lasagna:

1/2 cup diced red onions
2 cans diced tomatoes
2 tsp garlic
1 lb sausage, precooked and casings removed (we left the casings on; it was like chewing bubble gum)
1 tsp salt
pepper to taste
2 tsp butter

We sauteed the onions in butter for five minutes.  Then, we added the garlic.

Two minutes later, we dropped the diced tomatoes in (popping open two cans from the pantry — no sense wasting them and our sausage. The sausage was a freezer find and “Thai flavored,” which made for a strong sauce.

We added the salt and pepper, and then boiled the noodles following the instructions on the box.

When the sauce was warm and the noodles were done, we layered as follows: sauce, noodles, pumpkin puree, sauce, grated cheese (used Cheddar, as that was all we had in our refrigerator), noodles, sauce and then grated cheese.

I put it in the refrigerator until dinner time. Then, we baked it at 350 for 35 minutes, until it was bubbly.

I loved it; our 2yo and 9mo loved it. Our 4yo refused to try it. Matt was on the fence; it tasted different from what he expected, and he didn’t dislike it, but wasn’t sure if he liked it. While he liked the flavors, he didn’t like the texture. The pumpkin puree made it runny. Any suggestions how to fix that?

And FYI, this is what happens when you try to cook with three kids:

I should give up.