I can only agree with you LOL. We all get things wrong sometimes but it is sometimes also better to hear the truth rather than knowing what all the other Mums were saying after! Pomegranate seeds are unpleasant to eat at the best of times let alone crushed. The juice as jelly I can understand...... Good luck!

I understand the weird, supposedly healthy, foods for the kiddies - like seaweed. Yuk!

But the one thing I could never even look at was a soup my Polish MIL would make from pig head and neck bones/meat. I don't know how to spell it, but it was pronounce "fass". (My DH's Polish friend's Mom from Chicago would maker the same thing, so I know it was really something that exists.) It might have tasted good but the look was disgusting, and, having seen it once, I couldn't even taste it with my eyes closed.

Oh Kate I do sympathise LOL

Yes IC, crushed pomegranite seeds, it was like crunching gravel. She mentioned that she used them because she couldn’t use nuts because of allergies.

Why put anything in? LOL

CAKate I’m definately in favour of healthy food for kiddies but Yes can sometimes get a little over the top.

Hm... A long time ago, I went on a trip to Australia as a companion to the person who planned the itinerary. It was great! One stop was somewhere in the middle where there was a lovely cultural center where older Aborigines showed various traditional arts and talked about their people's nomadic history. In the USA, at the time, there was a big panic about giving children sugar, and the dangers to their budding teeth of letting them sip fruit juice, not just manufactured drinks. So this wonderful, grandmother type was talking about how their forebears moved following the water, etc., and how when the little ones got bored and fussy, they'd knock over a termite mound and give the toddlers the larvae to eat because they were sweet. Then and there, I gained the attitude that if nomidic moms could give their kids a little candy, it's not so wrong or ”unnatural” for the rest of us, in moderation. Beyond the texture issues, the flavor of tart pomegranate with sour cherry doesn't sound so pleasing to kids.

Why didn’t she just take some carrot sticks or clemtines?

As a child, I preferred okra to candy, and vegetable were my favorite foods. I grew up on a farm, and we grew a lot of our own vegetables, including corn, green beans, turnips, collard greens, okra, potatoes (I loved digging these up), lettuce, carrots, bell peppers, etc. The maid took care of the vegetable garden, but I did help with the harvest and some of the food prep - especially the green beans.

Pomegranates fall into my yard seasonally now because the people across from my back yard have a tree right next to our wall. I really dislike pomegranate seeds and use pomegranates only for juice, much the way I used passion fruit when I lived in Venice.

One of my favorite snacks as a child was celery, and I would eat it plain. I would not eat cheese or dairy products as a child, but I think I had different preferences from most children.

Everyone demands to have his/hers fruits to have the preferred texture. I will not eat bananas that are too firm or too soft, for instance.

Yet I don't want to waste good food and throw them away .

Easy. fruits which are not at a stage of texture the way I like, I put them all in my

Vitamix and turn them into wonderful smoothies.

dcarch

Oh geez - I've never wanted to chew on pomegranate seeds, and when eating the fruit, I always spit them out afterward. How old are the kids in the playgroup?

And how well did this snack go over with the other kids, I wonder?

Might this have been a case of strategic incompetence on her part?

2 of my grandsons went to a Charter School. The food rules there were, at best, difficult. There were all sorts of non-allergy requirements, low/no sugar, NO high fructos corn syrup... ever, no nuts, etc. My daughter would work quite hard at providing the snack when it was her turn, and it wasn't easy. I can understand your DIL's desperation.

Yes you are quite right CAKate it is a difficult chore to achieve with all the requirements around sugar , nuts etc. It was just the texture of mushy cherries, sliminess of agar agar and the gritiness of the crushed pomegranate seeds that got to me personally. It also needed a little sweetness. They weren’t well received as a lot came home where they have sat on the counter for a couple of days.

Sherry, I guess everyone takes carrot sticks etc my DIL wanted to do something different... it wasn’t a recipe she’d seen, she just made it up.

Hmmm, if they're that mushy(moist) and have been sitting unrefrigerated for days, I'd be wary of bacteria...

Sounds like she views cooking the way my sister does - as a sort of chemical experiment! And no, my sister's interests are political, no scientific, so I have no idea where she got this viewpoint.

All the rest of us love to cook but we're the "color between the lines" types, LOL.

Oh Neely, I feel for those poor children! I am one who has a problem with texture, I can't even put Jello in my mouth without gagging, so your description made me cringe. I'm sure your DIL is a lovely person, but that just sounds terrible.

Annie