Any good recipes?

I’m looking for ideas on how to make someone fat. Not me, my Eldest. He’s nearly six feet tall and so skinny we keep mistaking him for a hat rack. It’s not that he doesn’t eat. He eats plenty. He just never gains weight. I don’t think he’s gained more than a couple of pounds over the last few years even though he’s probably a foot taller than he was.

I’ve been trying not to worry, but things came to a head last week when he caught a virus that’s going around at school. It’s a flu-type virus – aches, tiredness, cough, sniffles and sore throat. But for M it had the added dimension of killing his taste buds and messing up his sense of smell so that everything smelled foul. The result of that was, of course, that he stopped eating. By Tuesday this week, when we finally got into the doctor (you have to plan illnesses and book ahead here), I was beginning to panic. He’d stopped feeling so tired and the cough was almost gone, but he looked awful.

The doctor, the same doctor who delivered him in spectacular fashion 15 years ago (breaking his own record of time taken to do an emergency caesarean – 7 minutes!) looked him over, felt at glands I didn’t even know existed and said there was nothing to worry about.

“But he’s so thin,” I said.

The doctor straightened up his own long, skinny body in his chair and said, “Well, some of us are made that way.”

“Is there no way I can fatten him up?” I asked.

The doctor’s eyebrows shot up and he laughed. “What, with his genes?”

You see, I married a skinny man who is the son of a skinny man, who was, in turn, the son of a skinny woman. Though my husband has, in middle age, developed just the hint of a paunch, he’s still thin and Grandpop (at 82) only has to stand with his arms out and crows fly away in alarm. So Eldest doesn’t really stand a chance. That doesn’t stop me trying though. Does anyone have any really tasty, fattening recipes guaranteed to entice a teenage boy to eat more than he thinks he should?

I’ll have to wear a blindfold while he eats it though. I only have to look at food and I put weight on. Why couldn’t Eldest get my genes?

(Before anyone lectures me about letting my son be who he is, I don’t really want to make him fat. He’s always been thin, always will be. I know that. And normally he’s just as fit as any other teenager. But I would like to give him just enough extra weight to see him through the next illness that zooms around school. So any ideas?)