Excerpt: "hungry monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater"

The following is an edited excerpt from "hungry monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater" by Matthew Amster-Burton ($23, copyright 2009). Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Amster-Burton is a Seattle writer who occasionally contributes to the Taste column. He lives with his wife, Laurie, and daughter, Iris, in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.

Grocery shopping is one of my favorite forms of entertainment. It's not just the produce, either — I can get lost in the baking aisle geekily comparing different brands of flour.

Iris doesn't share my enthusiasm, so I don't take her to the supermarket very often. Maybe once a week, when just the two of us are home in the afternoon and I realize I'm missing an ingredient for dinner. Then I can say, "If you want Ants on a Tree tonight, we have to go get some noodles," which usually wins her over. But shopping at the supermarket with Iris brings up the kind of stereotypical parent-child issues that I like to pretend I can opt out of. As in: Iris tries to convince me to buy some stupid product. I say no. She whines. I relent. When we get home we eat 10 percent of the product and the rest goes stale. This happened most recently with frozen pretzels, which I agreed to buy even though we make homemade pretzels and Iris loves to sprinkle salt on them.

Recently QFC added this new kind of cart that is, like the Grim Reaper, simultaneously great and terrifying. It's a small cart with two baskets stacked vertically. Each basket is the size of one of those hand-carried plastic shopping baskets. I have my top basket and Iris takes the bottom one. The little cart makes her a first-class citizen of the supermarket republic. Maybe she'll grow up to be a daily shopper like her dad. As for the fact that Iris isn't into comparing unit pricing, however, that's just unacceptable.

So instead of any further griping about how Iris is missing out on the joys of comparing bulk and packaged nut prices, let me tell you about a few places where she does love to shop.

Bavarian Meats

Bavarian Meats is a German sausage emporium in Pike Place Market. We shop there for slab bacon and Westphalian ham, Iris' favorite. I am working up the courage to try their bundnerfleisch, a hard beef sausage that is literally black. They give kids free wieners, wrapped in a napkin for immediate consumption.

On one of our visits to Bavarian Meats, they were giving out free samples of landjager, a hard German salami stick. I tried it and warned Iris that it might be too chewy. By the time we got halfway down the block she had finished it, and we had to go back and buy some. Iris will try absolutely anything offered as a free sample. Once I tried to kiss her good night and she said, "No free samples!"

Uwajimaya

If you're shopping at Uwajimaya in downtown Seattle and you notice a 30-something guy and his daughter loitering near the chilies and scallions and looking shifty, I can explain. We're not terrorists, but we are waiting for something to explode. Several times an hour, the sound of thunder rings out over the produce department, followed by an anticlimactic sprinkle of water over the greens.

Iris thinks this is the best thing ever. Now we have to go to the produce department first thing, which is fine with me, because I also think the produce department at Uwajimaya is the best thing ever. They always have fresh turmeric, shiso leaves and lime leaves. There are a dozen varieties of Chinese greens, two dozen fresh chilies, and green mangoes and papayas for making crunchy salads.

Uwajimaya is to ordinary Asian supermarkets as the giant Mekong catfish is to a pet goldfish. They stock everything for cooking East Asian food, with a particular emphasis on Japanese and Hawaiian products. When I say "Hawaiian products," I mean Spam sushi. This is not a joke. Broadway Farmers Market

Remember the episode of "Sex and the City" with the guy who never left Manhattan? I used to live in Manhattan, and I was that guy. Now I'm even worse. I rarely leave my Seattle neighborhood. I walk Iris to school. My parents live a few blocks away. Sometimes Iris and I take the bus downtown or to University Seafood and Poultry, but fundamentally, we're walkers. If you told me I could never leave the Hill again, that would be totally fine.

So when our farmers market opened three years ago, it was the last piece of the neighborhood puzzle for me. In the ecosystem of gourmet shopping, big markets such as Pike Place are the charismatic species — the mountain gorilla, the Bengal tiger. Little neighborhood markets like mine are the unknown insect species that you've never even heard of, but if it goes extinct, you're hosed.

When you shop at the farmers market, you start to get a sense of which items are really better at the market and which offer only a karmic benefit. I refuse to buy corn from anyone other than Alvarez Farm, because doing so is always disappointing. Oh, and local, organic food, the stuff that has a reputation for being expensive and elitist, is a bargain. They have the gall to sell celery root for $5 a pound at my local supermarket. One day we brought home a gargantuan 2 ½-pound celery root from the farmers market. A brain surgeon could have operated on it for practice. It was $2.

Aside from saving money and being a good citizen and stuff, I like scaring Iris with warty fingerling potatoes and weird gourds, both of which are sold in abundance on Broadway in the fall. After the market closes for the year, in November, I get a little depressed and eat few vegetables until spring.