Curliness

I have an 8 year old grandson, he's a good lad but he is a very fussy eater.

Going back some years, there were few problems and he would eat a wide variety things. In fact he once swallowed a 20p coin whilst imitating his grandfather's magic trick!

But now, much to his mother's despair he will only eat a small number of food items, mostly consisting of reconstituted chicken in its various guises, such as "Chicken Nuggets" and "Chicken Goujons" (they're chicken nuggets for posh kids). Oh and baked beans.

As far as real vegetables are concerned, offer him anything remotely green on his plate, and you’d  think you had served him the severed head of John the Baptist !

Furthermore, and I know this is absurd, he even winces at that staple of most children’s diets today, chips !!!

But here's an interesting thing. Out there is a particularly strange food commodity, designed less for nutritional value than to make the producers lots of money, called “Curly Fries”. They're basically nothing more than thin curled chips as far as I can see, and my grandson loves them.

So you can take some thin chips, deep fry them, then add a final flurry of curliness and they suddenly become irresistible to him !

I wonder how they do it ? Is it something similar to how you can curl paper by pulling it against a knife edge, or perhaps they pass an electric current through them. Have they used genetically modified potatoes with a curly gene added? I just don’t know.

So would the novelty of curliness work with other things he isn't keen on, I asked myself ?

I know there are curly kales and cabbages, but I don't grow them, so this year I have produced just the thing to try out on him.........

                                              Curly Runner Beans.

Don't ask me why they've grown like this, I haven't clue. Maybe they were too close to the spring onions.