Confidence and Schnitzel

A misplaced confidence. My youngest has two speeds, stationary and gone. One moment she's on the sofa, the next I’m doing a full sweep of the house trying to work out which room she's disappeared into and whether the back door was left open. I've since learned that parenting involves a surprisingly high volume of controlled panic dressed up as calm authority. The authority part was my own doing. Early on, I made the tactical error of leaning into the "Daddy knows everything" position. It seemed like a reasonable approach at the time. It was not. My eldest has inherited a talent for the follow-up question. Except that his way of asking "why?" makes it immediately clear he's less interested in the answer than in watching me struggle to say something plausible. I'd like to think I'm raising kids who question things out of curiosity. The irony is that doing so has forced me to question a few things myself. Recently, when my eldest asked me what I was cooking (it was schnitzel), I should've known what was coming… “What's schnitzel?” I was tempted to simply answer, “It's dinner.” As it happens, I only knew the crispy surface of it anyway. It's enough to order confidently in a restaurant, but not quite enough to explain it properly to someone who actually wants to know. There's more history in that dish than most people realise, more regional variation than the menu usually admits to, and a long-running argument between Austria and Germany that has never been fully resolved. The details are worth knowing, if only so the next time someone asks you why, you have a slightly better answer than I did. → What Is Schnitzel? It Depends on Who You're Asking It won't necessarily make you a better cook, but it might make you sound like one. Which, in my experience, is half the battle anyway.Herzliche Grüße,EranP.S. My eldest still eye-rolls me for not knowing the names of all the Paw Patrol characters. But I'm choosing to frame that as a personal boundary rather than a gap in my knowledge.

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Confidence and Schnitzel

A misplaced confidence.

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