Do your kids like eating paste—that thick, finger-spreadable, semi-opaque, minty-smelling, non-toxic goo? I think I may have stumbled upon a way to wean them off:
- Purchase some tapioca pearls.
- Follow the directions on the box for making plain tapioca pudding, but make the following alterations
- Swap out mint flavoring for the vanilla extract.
- Add 20% more tapioca pearls to the recipe.
- Tell your kids that they can eat as much of the stuff as they want (don’t worry about them putting on a few pounds at first—the point is that they will be eating food and not art equipment).
- …
- …
- Profit!
Note: I do not have kids. This has never been tried in a real-life situation with living human post-embryonic offspring. I have never mixed mint with tapioca pudding before. If your children die from some freaky mint-tapioca chemical explosion, it is not my responsibility to clean up your kitchen.
Where the hell did you come up with this idea?
One part convenience: I had tapioca on hand and decided to finally use it up.
One part experimenter: The recipe called for using almost all of the pearls in the box, so I just dumped them all in without altering the liquid amounts at all.
One part five-year-old: When I was cleaning the pot used to cook the tapioca, I scraped out the extra with my hand and found it quite thick and sticky and hard to wash off—much like paste.
One part crazy
Or you could always feed them gruel!