Diplomacy

 The garden mysteriously produced one pumpkin.

It was small; in hindsight this was a blessing. When I showed my daughters a photo of the pumpkin, their natural question was, "What are you going to do with it?"

Thai Drift restaurant has a delectable pumpkin curry on their menu, so without thinking, I wrote, pumpkin curry--thinking perhaps that I could re-create something so delicious. The Sunday arrived when we planned to have dinner as a family, and what could be a better treat than homemade, from fresh pumpkin, pumpkin curry?

Nothing. In hindsight, it was an overly optimistic presumption. 

I found a recipe, pulled out my largest pot, doubled the ingredients, and hoped to please everyone's palate.

I was the first to taste the pumpkin curry. It was spicy. It was delicious, but soon realized it wasn't so to Tony. He tried to stealthily pull a chicken breast out of the freezer, thaw and cook it, and add it to his curry. I left the room.

When we joined family members at the dinner table, first reactions were positive. "Hmm good taste."

But the teenagers left full helpings and the littles didn't touch any of their tiny servings. The teenagers snuck away early from the table. But Grandma inquired after dinner, even as they tried to avoid me.

I caught the 17 year old leaving out the garage door, "You left all of your pumpkin curry on the table. You didn't like it?"

He stopped, turned around, and looked me in the eye, "The flavor and spice was on point. The potatoes were delicious. It was the pumpkin I didn't like."

In the morning, Tony and I laugh at our grandson's articulate diplomacy, and now that it's out in the open, Tony and I discuss the pumpkin curry failure. 

"Well, the hard part was the stringy parts that came off the pumpkin," Tony comes clean.

I should have cut well past the pulpy center. Mistake #1.

Thai Drift pumpkin curry has a maximum of two pieces of pumpkin in one serving. Mine had twenty. Mistake #2.

I used a recipe found on the internet and untested before I served it to the connoisseurs. Mistake #3. We all know how family is attached to traditional, tried and true foods. My family lives and dies by those foods.

Whole civilizations, tribes, and countries, were built on those foods. But perhaps they had to learn too to cut the pulp off the pumpkin pieces, or cut the chicken just so, or remove the flesh between the pomegranate seeds. Or that bread had to rise or the kimchi needed to cure another day or two. It's how we become a civilization; it's how we become family.