The baby was having nothing to do with the mushroom.
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It sat between us on the high chair tray, warm and black and shiny. A just-cooked chunk.
I thought it looked delicious. The baby? Not so much.
"Loooooook!" I said, with that weird high-pitched, sing-song voice that comes as naturally as the chicken-clucking noises, the pigeon-cooing noises, the raspberry-blowing, nose-scrunching, la-la-la-ing that bursts forth when I'm within slobbering range of a baby, and particularly one whose every cell carries an imprint directly from me.
The baby, 14 months, and I share slobber. My granddaughter's slobber is partly mine, and vice-versa. (And excuse me if you're eating your breakfast at this point. I should have started this with a warning.)
But back to the baby and the mushroom.
"YumyumIwishIcouldeatthisyummymushroom," I said to her. And yes, I tend to run my words together when I'm with her as well.
I don't know why, but she doesn't seem to mind when I blather in her presence. She's also a big fan of my version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, complete with hand movements, which shows she's not particularly discriminating on verbals yet.
But she is on food. And last Saturday morning she was making it clear she didn't care for mushroom.
I picked the mushie up and pretended to nibble as if it was a "sweet-tasting langoustine in the powdery magenta scattering of ground Icelandic dulse (seaweed) and pretty blobs of oyster emulsion". (An actual reviewer's description of a dish by Danish chef superstar Rene Redzepi.)
The baby looked at me with the blank, big blue-eyed bullfrog face she adopts every so often when the adults around her are trying her patience.
She might be 14 months old, she might be pre-verbal, but she looked at the chunk of mushroom and knew there would be no burst of Icelandic seaweed or sweet-tasting langoustine if she took a bite. There would be mushroom, and she doesn't like mushroom.
I held it out to her within chew range.
She gave me nothing.
I put it back on the tray and gave it a little nudge in her direction, as if a moving mushroom edging reluctantly within her reach would be more palatable than a stationary one.
She picked it up. I smiled in anticipation of her eating it, but with a deft straight-armed flick she dispatched the chunk to the floor, slightly behind and to her left.
Then she turned back to where her father - my youngest son - had the scrambled eggs, avocado mash, bacon and toast she wanted.
She pointed, said "Ta", and waited for the adults around her to come to their senses, forget all the mushroom nonsense and give her what she wanted.
"She doesn't like mushrooms," I said.
"Today," my son said. "She seems to be going through everything you can put in your mouth to decide what she likes and what she doesn't like. She liked mushrooms the other day but she's over them now.
"She's a foodie. Mushrooms are so last week. If I put an artichoke in front of her now she'd probably eat that for a day or two and then move on.
"About the only constant is her bottle at night and porridge. She loves her porridge."
The baby eats like her father ate as a child, and she has his temperament. If she's fed she's content. If she's not fed she looks at you big-eyed, with a little downturned mouth, and if you don't catch the signal she'll go and find something to eat herself.
It was a few kibbles of dry dog food one day, when she was crawling around on my son's deck and felt a little peckish.
She chomped on a couple of dry doggy somethings - say, wild blueberry, pomegranate and milk-fed yearling crispy bites - was sated or underwhelmed, and crawled on.
One of my sisters years ago used to eat worms that she found on the long concrete strips of our driveway. She was crawling at the time. I was six or seven.
She would track down those worms in any condition - a dried up old thing that had been driven over 20 times and fried in the sun was as palatable as a still wriggling freshie. (Again, sorry if you're still finishing your avocado toast and goats cheese.)
I can't say I did much to stop her, or thought much of it for that matter. She did it pretty regularly and it didn't do any harm.
My granddaughter's dry dog food phase seems to have come and gone as well.
And for anyone horrified at the thought of a baby having a dog biscuit chew (and I'm with you if we're definitely drawing the line before canned dog food) I ask you to consider this.
Today is the last day of the nearly month-long State Fair of Texas.
Several million Americans have lined up to eat good ol' Texan food, by which I mean State Fair Texan food that doesn't pass muster if it hasn't been deep fried. And they deep fry anything.
For the past couple of years one of the cult fair foods has been, and I'm not making this up, deep-fried butter, described as a "snack food made of butter coated with a batter or breading and then deep-fried".
There's film of people eating the things, and I think I'd rather watch strangers eat a bowl of wet dog food.
You can eat fried creme brulee berry crunch, fried bubblegum, a fried cotton candy taco, fried jelly, fried coke, fried beer, a peanut butter cup snookie, deep fried bayou fruit bites or this year's winner of the best sweet dish - something called a Big Red Chicken Bread.
Words don't do it justice, but imagine a doughnut covered in pink icing - made of the local Big Red soda that tastes like bubblegum - bearing a deep fried chicken wing wearing sunglasses. All I can say is that Donald Trump is their President and nearly three years in, it's really starting to show.
And did I mention the Deep Fried Spam?