Winter is that wonderful time of year when children get to not appreciate other kinds of food.

I spent a while chopping up butternut, grating the zest of a naartjie* (just google it, ok?) and generally creating the soup to end all soups.

If I put a bowl of soup next to, say, a Happy Meal from a particular chain of restaurants on the table, and gave the children a choice, I can tell you that they would go for the boxed stuff every time.

Which is odd, because a recent poll of chefs asked what they would choose to eat as their last meal if they were going to be executed, and almost all of them chose comfort food. The kind of food Mum used to make when they were small (or Maman, seeing as a lot of them were French). Roasted this, stewed that, fresh whatever. None of them chose junk food, or even complicated food like a reduction of truffles on a nest of Russian caviar blah blah.

Does this mean, then, that in thirty years time, my children will go misty-eyed with nostalgia over food that had them making quiet gagging noises before they were sent to their respective rooms? If I am still around (as I hope I am, I will highlight their revisionism, and force them to eat plastic burgers.

Of course, they won’t be living at home then. Surely?

*

*Ok, I took pity on you. This is a naartjie- sort of a tangerine.