Picky, picky, picky Kids who don't like certain foods may have good reason: more tastebuds.(FLORIDA WEST)(Recipe)

Byline: Sharyn Lonsdale STAFF WRITER

When you consider all the things little kids do eat, it's amazing what they won't touch," writes Ann Hodgman in her light-hearted cookbook "One Bite Won't Kill You."

The trials of pleasing her own two children, now teen-agers, gave her the idea for a cookbook dedicated to picky eaters. In it she shares stories of straining canned alphabet soup of all broth and of her son sharing that he ate "a roll and water" for school lunch.

"One Bite Won't Kill You" is an amusing look at the effort it can take to get through a meal with a finicky family. Hodgman doesn't offer a cure for the limited palate, just an assurance that "It's more important to have meal times be a fun time together than to focus on what they're eating."

I could have used Hodgman's advice when I realized that my own kids' food preferences were wreaking havoc at dinner time.

I was making the busy family's staple, spaghetti. Since my 10-year old daughter had developed the ability to detect even the most microscopic morsel of onion and garlic, I had abandoned making sauce from scratch. They also weren't too keen on "weird shaped" pasta, so it would be straight spaghetti and sauce from a jar. Simple, right? Except ... the 9-year-old wanted lots of mushrooms and the 7-year-old didn't like mushrooms, and having declared herself a vegetarian, refused any meat. Meanwhile, my husband only wanted the sauce he grew up on, that had both meat and mushrooms. I was in the mood for sauteed peppers and onions that nobody else would touch. My "easy" meal had become a four-burner, two-sink nightmare.

When did this happen? In their younger days, one or both of my kids loved stir-fry, quiche, broccoli and corn chowder. But now the quiche was "too soft" the stir-fry "too oniony" and the corn chowder "too chunky." Jars of Oriental sauces and spicy salsas were sentenced to the back of the pantry as I relied more on kid-pleasing convenience foods. Ten years of motherhood had sapped all the joy from my long-time passion for cooking.

Hodgman knows that a …