Featured Image Credit: Sergiy Tryapitsyn / tom viggars / Alamy Stock Photo
Topics: Real Life, Life, Parenting, Food and Drink
Rhiannon Ingle
Topics: Real Life, Life, Parenting, Food and Drink
While we all may slightly differ when it comes to our children's diets, some people believe that certain ingredients are a total no-go altogether.
This was exactly the case for one mum in particular who was left absolutely outraged after her co-worker poured in a controversial addition to her son's pasta sauce.
The news has since sparked a heated debate online with parents weighing in over the contentious contents of the meal.
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One mum couldn't believe her ears when her son told her exactly what her coworker served him up for dinner.
The woman revealed to Reddit that she wanted to do the mum a 'special favour' and agreed to babysit her eight-year-old son one evening.
When asked what he wanted for tea that night, the Reddit user explained that the child wanted 'pasta and red sauce'.
Taking a page out of her tried-and-tested arsenal of pasta recipes, the woman explained: "So, I made a really great tomato/red wine/sausage sauce recipe I know."
She added: "He absolutely loved it."
The plot then thickens - similar to the sauce in question - when the son hadn't stopped 'raving' about the pasta dish that the colleague whipped up for him.
Wanting to recreate the hyped-up dish, the mum asked her colleague for the recipe which she 'gladly' gave her.
"Upon reading it," the woman explained, "she got really angry, and said that it was totally inappropriate for me to serve a child wine sauce."
In an attempt to explain to the furious mother that alcohol 'almost entirely boils off' when the sauce simmers, the woman was met with total rage after being told by the parent that she did not want her son drinking 'any amount' of wine at all.
"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," she said.
Before cooking the meal, the woman also made sure to ask the mother if her son had any food allergies/dietary restrictions to which she assured he didn't.
"When I mentioned this to her after she got upset at me," they revealed.
"She said that it’s common sense to not feed someone else’s kid something with alcohol in it without asking permission."
Detailing a little more about her decision to include the wine in the sauce, the colleague recalled that when she was younger, 'all of us kids' grew up eating red wine tomato sauce.
She listed the other more adult dishes that she commonly ate as a child including; 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."
Rounding up the Reddit post, the woman asked if the mother was 'being weird' or if she was an 'a**hole'.
Before ending the question, the woman also noted that the annoyed parent 'isn’t of a religion that prohibits alcohol' and explained that the two have had drinks together on 'several occasions'.
Thousands of people have since weighed in on the matter with many siding with the babysitter.
One person wrote: "I think your coworker needs to do some research on how alcohol is used in cooking for flavour. It is not harmful at all."
"Whatever alcohol was left was not enough to hurt the kid, and it's pretty common to use wine in pasta sauces," a second agreed.
A third added: "The mum's freakout was unjustified, and the sauce was perfectly fine to serve. The mum should have handled this much better."
Another Reddit user said: "If [your] coworker can’t be grateful for minding and feeding her child, she can go ‘wine’ to somebody else!"
However, a few did come to the mother's side with one writing: "I can kinda get the coworker's side.
"You have a child in your care and gave them a recipe with alcohol in it and not told the parent," they explained before adding that the mum had a 'right to know' what their child was being fed especially if it contained alcohol.