Love is a Meatless Ball...

Alyssa, my eight-year-old, is way into writing and publishing stories right now.  She brought home several funny, creative, and well-written stories yesterday, and she begged me to write some stories of my own.  Considering her budding interest in writing and two-year-old Brooke's great interest in listening to stories, I have created this based-on-real-life-events story for my daughters (and for you!)...

Mom’s Spaghetti and Meatless Balls

It was 3:58 PM on a sunny Wednesday in May.  A mother and one little girl sat in their car, parked along the side of the road, watching cars go by.  One minute later, the little girl called out, “SKOO BUS!”

A bigger little girl, the one little girl’s big sister, jumped off of bus 4, looked both ways, and raced across the street.  She opened the door to the car, and got in, asking, “What are we having for dinner?” before she even said, “Hi, Mom and Brooke.”

“Spaghetti and meatless balls,” was Mom’s response to her bigger little daughter, Alyssa. 

“Bee-balls!  Bee-balls!” little Brooke chanted happily. 

“Ugh,” was all Alyssa could muster.  Her mom was forever trying to make her eat weird things—from chocolate-zucchini muffins to ricemellow fluff.  Now meatless balls?!  Why couldn’t she just serve fluorescent orange mac’n cheese like the cool moms?

Mom even managed to make Alyssa’s school lunches embarrassing.  While the other kids were eating Lunchables, chips, and cookies, Alyssa was forced to eat things like yogurt, banana-flaxseed muffins, carrots, and strawberries.  It was torture.

Later that evening in the kitchen, Alyssa was working on her Rocket Math homework and Brooke was choloring in her Hello Kitty activity book.  Mom was boiling green lentils and simmering brown rice.  An oddly meaty smell filled the kitchen as some garlic, scallions, and mini Portobello mushrooms cooked in a skillet.

Then, Mom interrupted Alyssa’s silent reading of Yoko’s World of Kindness when she began to chop up the meatless…sigh…ingredients in the food processor.  She formed the strange-looking mixture of veggies, beans, grains, and spices into sixteen ping pong sized balls, which she placed in rows on a shiny foil-lined cookie sheet.  Into the oven they went.  Oh, joy.

As Mom boiled water for the spaghetti in a big steel pot, Alyssa surveyed the pile of cooking debris on the counter around the sink—mixing bowls, knives, food processor parts, measuring cups and spoons, the green tops of some stinky scallions, mushroom stems, and the box from the organic spaghetti.  The long, skinny noodles were brown and apparently “eight whole grain with milled flaxseed,” whatever that meant.  Was it too much to ask that our spaghetti noodles, at least, be normal and white like everyone else’s?

It was hopeless.  Even the tomato sauce was strange.  As if plain old tomatoes weren’t bad enough, this stuff was Organic Garden Vegetable!  The addition of more vegetables took this sauce from a moderate inconvenience to a serious problem.  “Can I just have my spaghetti plain?” Alyssa ventured. 

“No, you need to have tomato sauce…and at least try a meatless ball,” Mom replied with a sigh, as she stirred the spaghetti noodles into the boiling water.  Why did she look so sad?  Alyssa was the one who was going to have to eat this crazy vegetable-filled meal, after all.

Later, Dad and Alyssa were in their usual seats at the island counter, bowls of spaghetti and sauce topped with the odd-little meatless balls in front of them.  Brooke was seated at her own little toddler person-sized table with a fishy plate covered with cut up meatless balls and tomato sauce “dip.”  Brooke was a big fan of good food presentation, and so Mom sprinkled some grated Parmesan cheese “sparklers” over the meatless balls.  Brooke was thrilled by this, and after asking for a “fork, peez!”  began to gobble up her sparkly bee-balls and dip.  Show off.

The rest of the family began to carve up their meatless balls and twirl up saucy spaghetti.  Mom and Dad tried their meatless balls and made comments about the texture and spice profile.  Alyssa ate the spaghetti, carefully circumnavigating the meatless ball chunks.  Mom noticed.  She picked a lentil-(if you know what that is, it’s smaller than a green pea) sized piece of meatless ball out and put it right on Alyssa’s tongue.  It fell off.  Right onto the floor.  Mom picked it up within five seconds, so she put it back in Alyssa’s mouth, and this time she chewed and swallowed it with a grimace.

“I think they’re as good as a regular meat meatball,” Mom said triumphantly.

“I wouldn’t go quite that far,” Dad said, although he had cleaned out his whole bowl of spaghetti and meatless balls already.

“Das gooood, liddle Mama,” Brooke added.  Brown-noser.

In stark contrast to the face Alyssa had made while ingesting the probably dog-hair covered microscopic piece of meatless ball that Mom had force-fed her, she generously stated, “It was okay.  I wouldn’t eat it again, but…” Alyssa just knew that Mom was going to make it again.  And chick-pea falafels.  And red lentil dal.  And carrot spice muffins and so on and so forth. 

Alyssa also knew, somewhere deep down, that Mom wasn’t making these foods to make her bigger little daughter the laughingstock of the Cheeto-eating, Hi-C-sipping kids in the lunchroom.  She was going to the trouble of making these vegetable-based, whole food meals because she cared so much about making sure her family was healthy!

Yeah, the little girls’ mom was weird, but she was the little girls’ mom, meatless balls and all.  Forever.

The End.