Assistance with translating little kid speak

My niece is almost 6 years old. She's been calling a lot of foods "spicy" when the food in question isn't anything close to spicy (she said that once about pancakes, for example). My best guess is that she simply doesn't like the food, but she insists on drinking milk immediately after tasting a "spicy" food.

I'm trying to determine what specifically she doesn't like about the foods. Besides the aforementioned pancakes (she usually eats pancakes just fine), she's said the same thing about a microwave meatball sub (meatballs were relatively bland), candy with pralines, spaghetti from Olive Garden, and some other foods I can't think of off the top of my head. (I thought tomatoes might be an issue, but she eats pizza just fine.) If I could nail down an ingredient or some sort of profile, I could avoid serving her those things.

Have any of you tried to feed small children and run into this problem? What was your solution?

Don't do repeat offenders and pray.

This is like a universal little kid thing, they all call foods they dont like spicy

Yeah my middle son went through a phase like this. It wasn't so much any food he didn't like was spicy (he would also tell us if he didn't like food in general) but anything with a very strong flavor of any sort was spicy to him.

I wasn't one to give him things he didn't like, so like Chris said if I gave him something and he told me he didn't like it, we just sort of crossed it off the list and tried something else next time. It is honestly just kind of hit or miss but anything you would find particularly bland, they might like. Frozen chicken nuggets, basic mac and cheese, etc. You can experiment of course but I always just had a backup on hand in case there was something he didn't like.