A Big Spinach Potato Pie, and feeding Toddlers

Last night I had a minor meltdown over a salmon fillet. Incidentally, many of my meltdowns seem to happen with a fish in the background. Perhaps it helps that they have such sad faces. Nothing like a bit of piscine empathy.

You see I don’t really buy salmon. It’s not local to the Med and it’s often of dubious quality, being massively over-farmed. I also get creeped out by the weird white scum that often comes out of it when it cooks (do they pump it full of stuff like cheap chickens? If so, what stuff?). So, in short, it’s something I usually avoid. But I had bought it in Lidl when scraping the very bottom of the barrel and casting about for things to feed the Tiny Saint.

It feels like we’ve been bottom-scraping for a good while now, if you’ll excuse the metaphor. You see my son is 28 months old, and he WILL NOT EAT ANYTHING. I am exaggerating of course, but the things he will willingly eat I can count on two hands, and they are as follows (N.B. everything else he literally snaps his mouth shut like a tiny, puckered trap door, and Nothing More Shall Pass):

• Pasta (with some sauces, always totally smooth/texture-free and preferably extremely creamy or salty)
• Rice (as above)
• Crackers (the cheapest and saltiest ones)
• Bread, the softer and whiter the better
• Potatoes, when very oily and salty
• Custard-stuffed croissants (not jam or chocolate ones, just the custard ones thank you)
• Porridge (our saving grace. Thank god for porridge. Known by him as Botty)
• Bananas (only about a third of one every other day if really pushed)
• Avocadoes (as above)
• Pizza (obviously. At any hour of day or night. The more doughy and pappy the better. He really likes the underbaked ones you get in plastic at the supermarket)
• Pancakes
• Fish (again, praise the good Lord for his love of fish. He sometimes eats cold fish for breakfast. He will eat sardines from the tin)

He doesn’t even like fruit. I had imagined toddlers might not be into vegetables, but I thought at least fruit was a sure thing. How can someone NOT LIKE AN APPLE? Spit out a perfectly ripe peach? Push away with scorn a slice of sweet melon? We live in ITALY for crying out loud, the land of ripe and abundant fruit, and my half Italian son will not touch any of the Roman banquet-esque fruit that tumbles from trees and market stalls all around us.

But then, niggling down inside me like a worm in an apple is the feeling that actually…ominous drum roll …my son is me! My favourite food groups have always been Fat and Salt; my favourite food at his age was a ham sandwich. Soft white bread, lots of butter, very salty ham. I still love a ham sandwich. And, there worming away inside me, is the feeling that I created this monster, because just about the only things I ate whilst I was pregnant with him were Ham and Cheese Paninos.

During pregnancy I took an English teaching job in a local high school. The only good thing about this job was the fact that the school was next door to a bakery and I bought my lunch every day from there (3 euro). I would choose a big, crusty, pale-yellow semolina bap, about the size of a dinner plate, and then make the lady in her cloth cap stuff it with freshly sliced ham (prosciutto cotto, I wasn’t allowed the crudo, though sometimes I forgot) and some sliced cheese too. She’d shove it in a brown paper bag and I would devour the whole thing, sitting in the empty staff room and reading the news before facing my monosyllabic teenagers. It was so delicious, and it was the only food that during these long 9 months didn’t make me feel like vomiting. That panino and fresh, cold orange juice. Everything else just made me feel sick. Was my son’s taste already developed in the womb? Was he dictating these preferences? Was it a return to my own childhood panino passion? Who knows. Anyway, it’s just another thing to feel maternal guilt about (the list is endless).

Add this guilt to frustration because I am trying to dream up dishes which mean I do not have to cook twice, but which we can all eat together. Dishes that are healthy and easy and homemade and do not cost the earth. I spend about 90% of my time making lists of things I could make, buying things I might cook, and then trying to cook them into something he might just accept. But really, deep down, all he wants are ham sandwiches.

It’s kind of like his monster pyjamas. His nonna bought him some monster pyjamas which he adores, almost as much as his motorbike pyjamas (also, unsurprisingly, bought by her). Obviously I think both are hideous. I like to dress him in natural fibres and neutral tones (Vinted). If there are any motifs they are exclusively plant or animal based because I am a pretentious bourgeois millennial who really loves nature. He points at his monsters/motorbikes and looks up at me under his angelic eyelashes, his smile so wide and toothy it crosses my mind to quickly shove some cucumber into it, and he waits for me to express as much excitement about them as he feels inside.

If she would just let me be myself! I can almost hear him thinking. And it’s the same with food. Maybe I should just let him eat supermarket pizza and dress entirely in clothing printed with vehicles of some variety, but I can’t help feeling that we must find a compromise. I would like to say the compromise was this pie (it wasn’t. But more on that later).

The clothing is a less serious issue. I don’t really care that much as it has absolutely nothing to do with his wellbeing, or even his enjoyment. And it is also not a constant point of contention, to the point where it is starting to make me depressed and anxious, and depressed about dinner is something I have felt for many years of my past life and something I never, ever want to feel again.

I feel depressed that he doesn’t like things that to me are delicious, that I’ve spent a life curating to become delicious. It makes me sad he spits out my homemade cakes, my nourishing ragus, my beloved braised beans. One of my most adored things; fruit, the sweetness and juiciness of fruit he does not care for, neither for the bitter greens and brassicas I crave and cook almost every day at this time of year (though weirdly he will eat an anchovy spiked cavolo nero puree, on pasta).

I just feel he is missing out on so much. Perhaps the correct way to look at it is to think how much goodness awaits him.

It is also made harder by the fact that I was weaning him he seemed to eat everything, as long as it was pureed, and then suddenly it stopped and the number of things he would eat seemed to reduce rapidly. This felt like backwards progress. I became anxious about what to prepare each night, dreaming up elaborate ‘hidden’ veg meals cooked just for him, before beginning the process of cooking for Lorenzo and I too. It meant that from 6 until 9.30pm I was in the kitchen cooking. And then he went to bed. I had no evening, I had no real time with him or Lorenzo, and I was stressed. Worse still, I was tense when feeding him, a mixture of pathetic and pleading and severe and sorry. And, after all that baggage, he very rarely ate my concoctions (chickpea and spinach risotto, weird green bean sauces, they don’t even sound good, can you blame him?). And so it was, after about a year of such stress I found myself weeping into a salmon fillet. I had swallowed all my misgivings and bought salmon and he didn’t even want that and I just thought all this is for nothing and why me and this stinking ugly salmon with the white scum out of a sad plastic packet and he won’t even eat that and where have I failed and what is wrong with my child but more importantly what is wrong with me.

 And then I decided something had got to give. I read an article on Substack by Giulia Scarpaleggia about feeding her 5 year old which helped. And then I went to the park and bumped into another mum.  

‘Riccardo doesn’t eat dinner’ she said, shrugging and smiling, without a shred of guilt. He just snacks in the afternoon (I have seen Riccardo’s snacks and they are the kind of things my son could only dream about) ‘and then he falls asleep in front of his cartoons on the sofa and I cover him with a duvet and that’s it’. At 7.30. At 7.30 I am still trying to wrestle a morsel of bad salmon down my son’s throat.

I watched as Riccardo’s mum offered my son a hazelnut chocolate wafer. It was in the shape of a cigar. He looked totally baffled. My poor deprived son had never seen anything like it. He smiled innocently at Riccardo’s mum and fed it to Bechamel, our dog.

I look at Riccardo. He’s a normal kid. And he doesn’t eat an evening meal! Yet he sleeps! He’s still alive! Part of the tension about the evening meal (and meals in general) is that after 2 years of sleepless nights (many of which are punctuated by yowling for milk) you cultivate a heavy and constant fear of them going to bed hungry, and thus waking up hungry. My son always woke up. My son was always hungry. He drank a lot of milk. He is massive, and has the same shoe size as his four-year-old cousin. I live in the constant fear that he could be hungry. He has inherited the Clark family constitution: we are all massive and can all consume massive amounts of food. 

This fear of hunger can make mealtimes agony, and I never want my mealtimes to be agony. So I pulled all our socks up and got a grip.

The next night I made something I knew he’d like, boiled brown rice (salty and olive oily) and half an avocado. I cooked the rice in the pressure cooker so it took half the time and went nice and soft and sticky as he likes it. It also meant I could get on with making our dinner at the same time. Before that, for tea, he had pancakes with almond butter and half a banana. He ate all his tea and all his supper. I didn’t plead, I didn’t push. I just let him get on with it whilst we drew 200 hundred red tractors.  

And then I felt fucking triumphant. And we were both happy.

So, to come back to the title of this story. The sformato is something I had spent a long time thinking about and a fair amount of time making because I was convinced he would like it. He didn’t, I don’t know why he didn’t, but let’s not dwell on that. It’s delicious. And it tastes just like something a kid would like, it’s a cheesy potato pie with a crunchy breadcrumb topping. I mean, if I actually think about the dishes I loved as a kid, the one that really got me was my grandma’s chicken, ham and crisp pie (creamy salty sauce, chunks of ham, soft chicken, and a topping of, wait for it, ready salted crisps). You can’t imagine how good this topping was. How good this pie was. Salt and fat, there you are again. Maybe I’ll try and make it for my son.

 Anyway, the sformato, I have been going back again and again for it, and I will try it again, never to be defeated. The mozzarella globules, when you hit them, are golden. The top crispy breadcrumb crust is golden. The way it souffles in the oven like a slightly oily sigh is golden. It is also an oven-to-table sort of thing which is all the more forgiving.

Whilst my son eats his salty sticky rice, and we our crispy, cheesy, green potato pie, life feels a little bit more forgiving, too.

Makes one large skillet, feeds a family of 6 easily

1kg of potatoes, peeled and cut into quarters (sort of golf-ball sized)

Salt

300g spinach

3 eggs

6 tbsp grated parmesan

1 ball of mozzarella

A few chunks of other cheese if you have it (I used a soft melty one, you could use edam, cheddar, or whatever you have. This is not necessary but more cheese is always a good thing)

Ground black pepper

40g butter

40ml or so of whole milk

A tbsp of olive oil

A handful of breadcrumbs

Boil the potatoes in well salted water until completely soft. Drain them well and then mash them (or pass them through a ricer). Add salt and pepper, half of the grated parmesan, a good splash of milk, half the butter and taste. Adjust the seasoning accordingly.

Wilt the spinach briefly in a pan with a little water in and chop roughly, squeezing out any excess liquid. Mix through the potato and then taste and season again with salt and pepper.

Now add the eggs and mix well to incorporate.

Take a skillet or round shallow baking dish and grease the bottom with some of the olive oil and a little of the remaining butter. Sprinkle over a fine layer of breadcrumbs. Now spread over the potato and spinach mix, pressing into it chunks of the mozzarella (torn is fine) and the other cheeses if using. Top with flakes of remaining butter, a good drizzle of olive oil and the remaining parmesan. Sprinkle over another fine layer of breadcrumbs.

Place in a 200 oven for about 30 minutes, until golden and bubbling. Serve, with a salad if you like.