Have they nothing better to do at the New York Times Magazine than steal my ideas?

Here’s what I wrote two days ago:

> A baby who is sitting up and starting to be weaned is ready to eat almost anything you eat.

And here’s what a great column in the Times Magazine says today:

> Make them eat what you do, even if you have to purée it. “If we ate butternut squash and carrots, so did they,” Matheson said, “and sometimes with fish. I just really thinned it with cooking water.”

The article is about how chefs feed their young kids. Here are some more choice tidbits:

> Make your children eat at the table from a very young age. Jody Adams, the chef at Rialto in Cambridge, Mass., said that her children–Oliver and Roxanne–never had highchairs.

There’s actually a better way to do this, I think. The value of the highchair is that it puts the baby at eye level with the rest of the family. Put the kid in a regular chair and they’ll disappear faster than a donut hole. So don’t throw away the high chair–throw away the tray, pull the high chair right up to the table, and put the baby’s food on a plate. We did this from day one. Yes, it’s messier, but if you’re after a non-messy baby feeding experience, you’ll have to get the baby laminated.

I’ll admit that when Iris is eating yogurt, I usually put the tray on to avoid a pants-change right after breakfast.

> The fact that chefs’ kids eat better than yours or mine isn’t surprising.

Actually, it is, since a lot of chefs I know subsist entirely on fast food and snacks grabbed while cooking.

> Pack lunches fashioned from leftovers. “If we go for Thai food,” said Naomi Hebberoy, a chef and owner of the Gotham Building Tavern in Portland, Ore., her daughter, August, “takes pad Thai the next day.”

If I’m eating phad thai, Iris will come over and eat all the tofu out of it. They should have mentioned this in the article.