I just googled myself and I got 10,500 hits. I'm famous! Ha ha - actually, I've just been on the web a long time and I happen to almost always use my real name. I think that accounts for the googling results.

I found a link to an essay I wrote a while back about Little J's homecoming. It's called "Vegetarian Comfort Food" and it's on Inmamaskitchen.com. I wrote it about my mom and the casserole she left in our fridge when we'd gone on our second trip to Russia.

I explain a little about my mom (she's a vegetarian and has been one since she turned 50; she was an engineer before she retired; and although she worked full-time when we were growing up she always cooked dinner every night from scratch - for all 7 of us).

Then I poke a little fun of my picky-eater husband:

Here's a secret about my mother's cooking: my husband doesn't like it. He is picky: he doesn't like onions or garlic or cooked tomatoes or big chunks of vegetables. He is always asking my mother, 'What's in this?" before he puts a bite in his mouth. He eats her cooking because he's polite and she's his Mother-in-Law, but almost every time we eat dinner at her house he comes home and eats a sandwich or some leftovers, 'just to tide him over.'

Then I talk about coming home from the airport after traveling all night:

We'd just flown for eleven hours with a good-natured but brand-new-to-us toddler in tow, and we were exhausted, dirty, and hungry.

"A casserole?" he groaned. "How about a pizza?î

But I turned him down. All I wanted to do was get home and sleep. I didn't care what I ate, as long as it was something.

"Let's just eat what she made," I said. "You can pick out the vegetables."

"Nothing will be left if I do that," he grumbled, but he drove past the pizza place.

When we got home, I went directly to the refrigerator. "Let's see what she made for us," I said, pulling out a casserole dish. "looks pretty basic," I called to my husband, who was busy bringing our bags in from the car. I stuck it in the oven to warm up.

"You hungry?" I asked Little J, who only understood about four words of English at that point. "Do you want to eat?"

He started to scream. 'Eat' was a one of his words, and because food had been in short supply at his orphanage his response to food was an anxious one: a frightening, high-pitched vocalization, clenched fists, and a purple face.

"Guess so," I said, and I sat him at the table. I gave him a couple of crackers. He crammed them whole into his mouth, making the sign we'd taught him for 'more.' While the casserole heated I sat down next to him, handing him crackers one at a time, making exaggerated motions with my mouth, trying to get him to chew.

Here's what happened when we gave Little J the whole-wheat-low-fat-vegetable-filled-no-cheese-or-anything-tasty-added-vegetarian casserole my mom had made for us:

As quickly as he could, Little J was shoving pieces of the casserole into his mouth. A noodle, a chunk of onion, a stewed tomato, a kidney bean disappeared. In minutes his serving disappeared and he was asking for more. It was astonishing.

We'd spent the past five days with this child and had been impressed by his appetite in that time, but it was as if now that he was at home - a place five thousand miles from where he'd been born - his hunger let loose with true abandon. It was almost as if he knew that now was the time to relax.

At one point he paused to take a breath, picked up a cooked mushroom and held it out to me. I expected him to throw it down in rejection, like any American toddler would do when faced with that bit of cooked vegetable. Instead, he showed it to me, smiled, and opened his mouth wide. He put the mushroom inside. "Mmmm," he said. Yummy, in any language.