My friend is furious because I gave her son pasta with red wine in the sauce
A woman has taken to a popular online forum to ask whether or not she was “irresponsible” for feeding her co-workers’ son pasta with a red wine sauce.
The boy’s mom insisted that she should have asked for permission first.
But the poster maintains her stance that the alcohol “entirely boils off,” so she doesn’t see an issue.
In the thread, which is titled, “Am I The A–hole for serving an eight-year-old red wine pasta?”, the poster explains that she was doing her colleague a “special favor” by babysitting their son.
The boy requested that she make him “pasta with red sauce” for dinner, so she cooked one of her tried-and-tested recipes which used tomatoes, red wine and sausages.
He absolutely loved it, as he “couldn’t stop raving about it” in the following days.
His mom was so impressed that she asked her co-worker for the recipe so she could have it in her arsenal as well.
“I gladly gave it to her,” the woman explains.
“But upon reading it, she got really angry and said that it was totally inappropriate for me to serve a child wine sauce. I told her that the alcohol almost entirely boils off when the sauce simmers, but she said that she does not want her kid consuming any amount of alcohol and that I was really irresponsible for not asking her permission first.”
The woman brought up the fact that she had previously asked the mom if her son had any food allergies or dietary restrictions to which she assured her he didn’t.
But that didn’t go down as anticipated, and the mom replied that “it’s common sense to not feed someone else’s kid something with alcohol in it.”
When the poster tried to rationalize her decision, she remembered that she always ate foods with traces of alcohol in them; penne alla vodka, meats with wine sauce, tiramisu and fruitcake.
She claimed: “Nobody would have ever thought to ask parents’ permission before serving such dishes to someone else’s kid.”
“I don’t think this is a generational thing, none of my friends with kids would have a problem with it either,” she concluded.
The top comment, with 10.5k likes, read: “I think your coworker needs to do some research on how alcohol is used in cooking for flavor. There’s literally no alcohol in the food anymore whatsoever and is not harmful. It’s basically grape juice at that point.”
This fact was backed up by Kidspot’s Food Editor, who confirmed that alcohol when used in cooking “burns off.”
And another popular reply echoed, “I agree, it won’t affect the child at all. If the OP’s coworker can’t be grateful for minding and feeding her child, she can go ‘wine’ to somebody else.”
This person added, “Your coworker is totally overreacting. I’m sure her kid has also eaten stuff with vanilla extract in it, which is like 35% ABV.”
“It’s not like you served her kid a glass of Merlot with dinner.”
But a few followers did take the mom’s side, saying that the OP should have asked or at least told the mom about what they did.
“She had a right to know,” one woman commented.
“Just apologize and don’t serve kids alcohol-based food without asking first. It’s that easy,” one mom said.
And some insisted that the alcohol doesn’t completely burn off during cooking.
“Unless OP cooked the sauce for more than three hours, it’s simply not true that there’s no alcohol left. After 30 minutes of cooking time, there’s still about a third of the alcohol present. Less alcohol cooks off than people think.”
They added, “OP is still NTA – whatever alcohol was left was not enough to hurt the kid and it’s pretty common to use wine in pasta sauces – but people should know there is some alcohol left unless you cook it a really long time.”
