What’s your relationship like with food and cooking these days? Are you “excited” for fall/winter food or have you taken the red pill and realize it’s all just a reason to wash more dishes? Have you made anything recently that has made your life better? Let’s hear how you witches are making do with the Sisyphean task of feeding everyone and cleaning up every.single.day.
(This is an experimental chat thread, not a newsletter, in case you’re wondering what the hell.)
My husband still believes in wiping down the groceries and takeout. (I am done trying to convince him this is based on old info.) That adds a little extra thread of stress to both getting groceries (some have to sit out for a period of time until they are 'safe') and takeout (don't touch that dressing container until it's been wiped down.) I have largely made my peace with this but it adds a little extra fuck-you to the whole eating situation.
We only gave this up in the last month or so, after the Washington Post article with 5 infectious disease experts, including Dr. Fauci, talking about how they handle things in their personal lives. None of them were wiping or quarantining groceries. It felt like a 100 lb burden lifted from my back when we stopped.
Making my family dinner is not cooking. I love cooking. I hate making a meal in 30 min or less with two screaming toddlers hanging off of me while my husband scrolls his phone in another room only to have him complain that the meal has too many vegetables in it. At least I don't have to do the dishes.
THIS RIGHT HERE. I love cooking on a Sunday with a bottle of wine to stave off the void. I hate throwing together dinner at 6pm, after a full workday, with a whining 4yo who either wants to help or wants to climb on me, and a husband who's just like "oh you're home that's neat." FAHK.
YES INDEED. I have a vegetarian child with some mild sensory issues and a lactose-intolerant husband so there is a nightly 0% chance of me making something that everyone likes. I wind up modularizing everything, ie, put your own sauce on the pasta *if you dare* or making separate meals and cursing to the four winds that I'll never do that again. But I do.
My favorite meal is pizza delivery and eating outside using paper towels for plates, and then throwing it all directly in the outdoor compost bin afterwards. No food or plates ever enter my house.
Um. That is brilliant. Why have I never considered this? And if you drink the whole bottle of wine outside while eating the pizza, you can take that right to the recycling bin, too!
I am the Dinner Cook in our house and I've been getting a lot more compliments lately on my work product because I went back to actually following recipes from trusted sources instead of a) throwing random piles of shit in a bowl every night or b) frantically googling the three ingredients that are about to rot and trusting in some rando's blog post from 2011.
Re: all those goddamn tomatoes, this was easy and the kids liked it and I liked it and my husband was like "I'm not really a soup person" and I was like oh yeah that's a cool opinion, duly noted: https://www.thekitchn.com/tomato-basil-soup-22931796
thank you for this recipe, we are drowning in tomatoes over here. My husband is also not a soup person so I guess he'll be not a dinner person on that night too.
I’m at “heat up and smash some beans for tostadas” cooking levels. I can chop and maybe use the blender but that’s my level of engagement with dinner rn. I LOVE cooking, too, but can’t deal with it anymore. My wife is experimenting with sugar substitutes and whipping up pavlovas with lemon curd and cutting out the remainder of the little meat we still eat. Meanwhile, I keep suggesting loaded nachos for dinner and adding flaming hot Cheetos and Oreos to our grocery list.
I like cooking and it provides a nice reason to stop working and do something else. My husband is usually the weekend cook and we have one carryout night per week. We don't have kids so the only other thing I'll say is that my sister-in-law (4yo and 1yo, she and her husband both work from home) plans her whole weekly menu out and writes it down on a whiteboard which I find incredibly impressive. She did tell me that one night her husband made dinner and their 4yo made a point of elaborately thanking him and my SIL was like "F that."
I use cooking as my outlet, and can make whatever the hell I want because my kid will only eat chicken nuggets and mac and cheese. However, when the meal I'm making is a failure in my opinion, it hits harder than it usually would. I tried pad thai for the first time last night and it was disappointing and kind of ruined my night? Like, come on world, food is the one thing I can control, just let me have this?
I hate everything to do with food consumption: buying it, cooking it, cleaning it. Pre-kids it was a neutral task, but having to do it all within time restrictions, while small people steal away to eat boxes of dry cereal WHILE I'm cooking food I know they probably won't eat has made me resent the task. My husband has largely taken over the task and I help by heaping praise on him about how good his food is. My mother taught me well: never complain when someone else is cooking.
Mostly my husband cooks, because it turns out that if you routinely neglect a task for years, someone will eventually pick up the slack. I'm still responsible for participating in "what should we have for dinner" conversations and finding recipes, and I do the grocery shopping. Some days I swear I am one blogger's fucking life story before they tell me the recipe away from completely losing my shit.
I skip past those blogs that don't have the "jump to recipe" option. Except Smitten Kitchen. Deb's the only one I care about. Don't get me started about those stupid video pop-ups.
I am not only so over the act of cooking, but also eating the things I cook. This is compounded by the limitation I have because of food allergies (what I would give for Indian take-out.) I blame this malaise partially to missing my family. My brother and sister-in-law live and die by the food channel, while my father has a small farm in his backyard and cooks everything from scratch. I usually spend a week or two at home during the summer where someone is always cooking for me or I am out sharing meals with my childhood friends. Not having that break has soured my relationship with cooking. My oldest has stepped up to the plate but is limited by her interest in only baking sweets. My husband grew up with a household cook and his skills are limited to what he can take out of a box and reheat. So we lumber along, hoping and praying that this lack of interest will lead to less stress eating.
I should also add, that the lack of interest in cooking has also caused me to forget to feed my dear offspring. Good things they are fairly independent.
My kids decided they were vegetarian, which I want to support, but it knocked out most of my cooking repertoire. So, we subscribed to HelloFresh's veggie option, and that has made the whole world of cooking easier: less shopping, no missing ingredients, no personal investment in some recipe. Just a bunch of food that comes to our door and is eaten because these kids decided they love animals AND the environment. Yes, I use guilt trips to get them to eat, still. But they are effective and reasonable guilt trips instead being about MY feelings, so I sleep okay. And we share responsibilities pretty well - if I cook, my husband cleans, and vice versa - and all the cleaning is easier when there is no raw meat juice to worry about.
Yesterday I made fajitas. While I ate them and fed the baby purée, my husband got up to take a work call, my 4 year old deigned to even look up from her dinosaur game, and my 2 year old sat on the couch moaning “mooooaarrr Peppppaaa”. So no I’m not making anything that takes up more than one pan for a while.
Same here, but I will never not believe that if he had to clean up he wouldn’t use every damn receptacle and utensil and spatter & splatter everrrrrywhere
My husband cooks, and I try to help with the dishes but he does not find my timeline for helping satisfactory (it is sometime before say 9pm, so after the 4yo is asleep but not way after), so he often does it himself.
I think the change of season is renewing my interest in cooking, or at least, not only viewing it as a endless dish parade. I'm already deep in pasta land since a) I can give the kids plain or buttered noodles and b) then add a sauce or vegetable that my husband and I would want to eat. A friend recommended this and it was easy and requires no cream so you can call it healthy! https://food52.com/blog/25538-why-heidi-swanson-walnut-pasta-is-genius
My husband cooks most days but I've been getting back to my Sunday Chinese cooking habit, because I really want our kid to appreciate her Chinese heritage and this seems like the most bang for my buck.
All hail the microwave, and all microwaveable foods - even the ones that subtly shame you for not using the stovetop or oven methods. I see you, chicken nuggets and Dr Prager’s minis and mini corn dogs, and I don’t care.
I hate cooking except in small doses and I don't have time with my masters degree coursework, family, and job. I've started ordering HungryRoot which is like being on Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee. Dinner is 3 steps and 10 minutes and healthy 4 nights a week. The other nights my wife makes dinner, lol.
I feel like I am either on the homemade sourdough/ arm delivery end of the spectrum OR on the microwave burrito/takeout end of the spectrum. There is virtually no in between and pre-pandemic it was a little more balanced and realistic. Like this week I wrote out this beautiful meal plan with lots of healthy, homemade meals and by Tuesday it was all scratched out and we've had takeout every night since. It's just way too much to put on any one individual - my kids are too young/uninterested in cooking and my husband is so bad at it that eating his food is substantially worse than any other option. I just try to cut myself some slack and remind myself that I am not here to be a short-order cook and if I want to make something that I like and no one else does...well, we always have bread and peanut butter on hand.
I have a 6-year-old and 3-year-old twins and they are all in the super-picky stage that makes me want to die by dinnertime. One day our power went out right before I was going to make dinner so I gave them all bowls of yogurt with granola and sprinkles and everybody was happy and there was no cleanup and it was a revelation. Otherwise, I have really embraced the popcorn and wine dinner after bedtime.
I want variety. I try to plan a mix of meat and meatless, different flavors (Italian, Mexican, Asian, etc) and sufficient amounts for a family of four plus leftovers for lunches. This is mentally exhausting, so I ask for help in coming up with ideas and planning for the week (we are trying to limit grocery shopping to once a week still.)
My husband's input, whenever I ask for ideas is, "Well, why don't we just grill some burgers or something." I finally raged out at this answer, which is not actually an answer, in that it's something I easily could come up with on my own and the fact that I don't on a weekly basis means I do not want to eat burgers every damn week.
I'm looking forward to putting soup back in the mix as the weather cools.
We joined a CSA this year and got a Sitka Salmon membership. By "we" I mean "I." My husband is a great cook and was supportive of us joining. I'm the one that is scouring our cookbooks or the web to find ways to use that third round of collard greens or japanese turnips before they go directly to the compost bin. When he has expressed some displeasure at whatever is in front of him, I have had to resist not throwing the plate at him.
We have gone from being described as "foodies" to having serious conversations about the potential virtues of Soylent shakes. The four year old only wants gardein nuggets...and pretzels. That's healthy, right?!?
Our family is me, my partner, & an almost 16 year old. Our before-times pattern, due to work schedules, was that I cook weekdays, my partner cooks weekends. This has mostly stayed. I applied for a CSA back in March and we're finally in, so I'm looking forward to experimenting with whatever they send. Last night, I made a big pot of black beans full of peppers from our garden, with rice and street corn on the cob. We'll have black beans for lunch leftovers for a few days—the teen will probably put them in burritos and my partner and I will throw then on a bed of greens.
Seriously, WHY do they want dinner EVERY day?? Even though I live in a place with four seasons, it’s always grilling season at my house, even when I have to shovel snow to get to said grill. This is partially because we all like grilled food, and partially because it creates way fewer dirty dishes. My instant pot is my other year-round dinner friend. When the weather gets chilly I re-incorporate sheet pan dinners into the rotation. My basic meal planning approach is entirely oriented around minimizing prep/chopping (baby carrots and mini potatoes ftw) and reducing dishes that need washing. Taste and variety? Ehhhh.
My challenge for the past several years is that my husband tries to stick to low carb, my son is a vegetarian and has never met a carb he didn't like, and my daughter is somewhere in between. We are at the sweet spot, though (kids ages 15 and 12) -- they cook for themselves during the day. (Getting them to clean up after themselves is . . . a work in progress.) I am mostly responsible for the evening meal, but occasionally my husband steps up.
I don't do much fancy cooking in the summer (salads, corn on the cob, charcuterie). I really get into soups and roasted vegetables in the fall, which still a several weeks away here in Maryland.
My house feels like an entire extra person in my family with it's unrelenting need for care - and the food portion of this weighs heavily: meal planning, grocery ordering, going back out for the vital ingredient that the nice instacart shopper can't find, figuring out what the kids will eat vs. what the adults will eat, getting it on the table in a reasonable amount of time...
When this whole thing started, I loved making meals. Then, I had a pandemic baby. Now, I'm thinking that the trade-off of takeout every other night and not putting away for the college funds may be worth it...
I used to love to cook, but right now I am ready for a week of all takeout, every meal. As it is, we are eating frozen stuff from Trader Joe's and the occasional vegetable or fruit before it goes bad.
We're just coming off two months living with my 86-year-old mother, a roll of the pandemic and familial relations dice in many ways--our daughter is 5, plus they have opposite schedules. But food, and who bought it and cooked it, and how it entered the house, were all points of potential conflict. My husband and I both love cooking and are good at it; my mother informed us she now "doesn't have a passion" for it, but acted sad when we told her in that case we'd cook the pork chops, etc. She also weighs under 100 lbs and always strictly controlled what both she and I ate when I was growing up. ANYWAY, it turned out that against her better judgement, my mother became an ardent fan of all the food my daughter loves best (that'd she'd never have bought in my childhood): cheesy Pirate's Booty, pepperoni pizza, and--the great leveler--Hood Unicorn Confetti Ice Cream Sandwiches. All of these were great points of intergenerational connection between them. Was I a bit smug about her conversion to these foods? Indeed I was! I tried very hard to be gracious about it. By our last week, my mother was sneaking a Unicorn Confetti Ice Cream Sandwich, washed down with cheap sherry, while watching The PBS Newshour at earsplitting volume.
I punted dinner on Wednesday night because <waves arms> and got the kids Chick Fil A and ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while staring out the window, wondering how we got here. I did not remember the pound and a half of chicken breasts that I had defrosted in the microwave that I intended to grill and use on a salad or something until the next day.
My husband still believes in wiping down the groceries and takeout. (I am done trying to convince him this is based on old info.) That adds a little extra thread of stress to both getting groceries (some have to sit out for a period of time until they are 'safe') and takeout (don't touch that dressing container until it's been wiped down.) I have largely made my peace with this but it adds a little extra fuck-you to the whole eating situation.
We only gave this up in the last month or so, after the Washington Post article with 5 infectious disease experts, including Dr. Fauci, talking about how they handle things in their personal lives. None of them were wiping or quarantining groceries. It felt like a 100 lb burden lifted from my back when we stopped.
Making my family dinner is not cooking. I love cooking. I hate making a meal in 30 min or less with two screaming toddlers hanging off of me while my husband scrolls his phone in another room only to have him complain that the meal has too many vegetables in it. At least I don't have to do the dishes.
THIS RIGHT HERE. I love cooking on a Sunday with a bottle of wine to stave off the void. I hate throwing together dinner at 6pm, after a full workday, with a whining 4yo who either wants to help or wants to climb on me, and a husband who's just like "oh you're home that's neat." FAHK.
YES INDEED. I have a vegetarian child with some mild sensory issues and a lactose-intolerant husband so there is a nightly 0% chance of me making something that everyone likes. I wind up modularizing everything, ie, put your own sauce on the pasta *if you dare* or making separate meals and cursing to the four winds that I'll never do that again. But I do.
I am caught between "oh great, another heirloom tomato" and "I will suffer a bout of depression when it officially becomes chili season."
My favorite meal is pizza delivery and eating outside using paper towels for plates, and then throwing it all directly in the outdoor compost bin afterwards. No food or plates ever enter my house.
the Ina Garten of this thread tbh
Um. That is brilliant. Why have I never considered this? And if you drink the whole bottle of wine outside while eating the pizza, you can take that right to the recycling bin, too!
You're a goddamn legend.
I think my Google search history sums up where I’m at: “astronaut meal pouches.”
My son subsists on Uncle Bens Spanish Rice in the envelope (I dared to by Target brand once) so there are close options.
Those things are amazing. Once I was super drunk and found one in the pantry and was so grateful to myself.
I freaking love Uncle Ben's Spanish Rice.
I am the Dinner Cook in our house and I've been getting a lot more compliments lately on my work product because I went back to actually following recipes from trusted sources instead of a) throwing random piles of shit in a bowl every night or b) frantically googling the three ingredients that are about to rot and trusting in some rando's blog post from 2011.
Re: all those goddamn tomatoes, this was easy and the kids liked it and I liked it and my husband was like "I'm not really a soup person" and I was like oh yeah that's a cool opinion, duly noted: https://www.thekitchn.com/tomato-basil-soup-22931796
"Well I'm not really a pandemic person but HERE WE ARE."
thank you for this recipe, we are drowning in tomatoes over here. My husband is also not a soup person so I guess he'll be not a dinner person on that night too.
I’m at “heat up and smash some beans for tostadas” cooking levels. I can chop and maybe use the blender but that’s my level of engagement with dinner rn. I LOVE cooking, too, but can’t deal with it anymore. My wife is experimenting with sugar substitutes and whipping up pavlovas with lemon curd and cutting out the remainder of the little meat we still eat. Meanwhile, I keep suggesting loaded nachos for dinner and adding flaming hot Cheetos and Oreos to our grocery list.
I like cooking and it provides a nice reason to stop working and do something else. My husband is usually the weekend cook and we have one carryout night per week. We don't have kids so the only other thing I'll say is that my sister-in-law (4yo and 1yo, she and her husband both work from home) plans her whole weekly menu out and writes it down on a whiteboard which I find incredibly impressive. She did tell me that one night her husband made dinner and their 4yo made a point of elaborately thanking him and my SIL was like "F that."
I use cooking as my outlet, and can make whatever the hell I want because my kid will only eat chicken nuggets and mac and cheese. However, when the meal I'm making is a failure in my opinion, it hits harder than it usually would. I tried pad thai for the first time last night and it was disappointing and kind of ruined my night? Like, come on world, food is the one thing I can control, just let me have this?
I hate everything to do with food consumption: buying it, cooking it, cleaning it. Pre-kids it was a neutral task, but having to do it all within time restrictions, while small people steal away to eat boxes of dry cereal WHILE I'm cooking food I know they probably won't eat has made me resent the task. My husband has largely taken over the task and I help by heaping praise on him about how good his food is. My mother taught me well: never complain when someone else is cooking.
Your Mom should have a talk with my husband.
Mostly my husband cooks, because it turns out that if you routinely neglect a task for years, someone will eventually pick up the slack. I'm still responsible for participating in "what should we have for dinner" conversations and finding recipes, and I do the grocery shopping. Some days I swear I am one blogger's fucking life story before they tell me the recipe away from completely losing my shit.
I skip past those blogs that don't have the "jump to recipe" option. Except Smitten Kitchen. Deb's the only one I care about. Don't get me started about those stupid video pop-ups.
I am not only so over the act of cooking, but also eating the things I cook. This is compounded by the limitation I have because of food allergies (what I would give for Indian take-out.) I blame this malaise partially to missing my family. My brother and sister-in-law live and die by the food channel, while my father has a small farm in his backyard and cooks everything from scratch. I usually spend a week or two at home during the summer where someone is always cooking for me or I am out sharing meals with my childhood friends. Not having that break has soured my relationship with cooking. My oldest has stepped up to the plate but is limited by her interest in only baking sweets. My husband grew up with a household cook and his skills are limited to what he can take out of a box and reheat. So we lumber along, hoping and praying that this lack of interest will lead to less stress eating.
I should also add, that the lack of interest in cooking has also caused me to forget to feed my dear offspring. Good things they are fairly independent.
My kids decided they were vegetarian, which I want to support, but it knocked out most of my cooking repertoire. So, we subscribed to HelloFresh's veggie option, and that has made the whole world of cooking easier: less shopping, no missing ingredients, no personal investment in some recipe. Just a bunch of food that comes to our door and is eaten because these kids decided they love animals AND the environment. Yes, I use guilt trips to get them to eat, still. But they are effective and reasonable guilt trips instead being about MY feelings, so I sleep okay. And we share responsibilities pretty well - if I cook, my husband cleans, and vice versa - and all the cleaning is easier when there is no raw meat juice to worry about.
Yesterday I made fajitas. While I ate them and fed the baby purée, my husband got up to take a work call, my 4 year old deigned to even look up from her dinosaur game, and my 2 year old sat on the couch moaning “mooooaarrr Peppppaaa”. So no I’m not making anything that takes up more than one pan for a while.
I wish they made disposable pans. And disposable stovetops. Just open up a fresh one every day.
The bacon, brussels sprouts, and eggs one-pan meal on Damn Delicious is really good.
Yum that sounds delicious. Thanks!
My husband cooks dinner and I clean up and it is the best ever.
Same here, but I will never not believe that if he had to clean up he wouldn’t use every damn receptacle and utensil and spatter & splatter everrrrrywhere
My husband cooks dinner and nobody cleans up. Help.
My husband cooks, and I try to help with the dishes but he does not find my timeline for helping satisfactory (it is sometime before say 9pm, so after the 4yo is asleep but not way after), so he often does it himself.
I think the change of season is renewing my interest in cooking, or at least, not only viewing it as a endless dish parade. I'm already deep in pasta land since a) I can give the kids plain or buttered noodles and b) then add a sauce or vegetable that my husband and I would want to eat. A friend recommended this and it was easy and requires no cream so you can call it healthy! https://food52.com/blog/25538-why-heidi-swanson-walnut-pasta-is-genius
My husband cooks most days but I've been getting back to my Sunday Chinese cooking habit, because I really want our kid to appreciate her Chinese heritage and this seems like the most bang for my buck.
All hail the microwave, and all microwaveable foods - even the ones that subtly shame you for not using the stovetop or oven methods. I see you, chicken nuggets and Dr Prager’s minis and mini corn dogs, and I don’t care.
My kids like the softer yet chewy texture achieved by the microwave better!
I hate cooking except in small doses and I don't have time with my masters degree coursework, family, and job. I've started ordering HungryRoot which is like being on Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee. Dinner is 3 steps and 10 minutes and healthy 4 nights a week. The other nights my wife makes dinner, lol.
I feel like I am either on the homemade sourdough/ arm delivery end of the spectrum OR on the microwave burrito/takeout end of the spectrum. There is virtually no in between and pre-pandemic it was a little more balanced and realistic. Like this week I wrote out this beautiful meal plan with lots of healthy, homemade meals and by Tuesday it was all scratched out and we've had takeout every night since. It's just way too much to put on any one individual - my kids are too young/uninterested in cooking and my husband is so bad at it that eating his food is substantially worse than any other option. I just try to cut myself some slack and remind myself that I am not here to be a short-order cook and if I want to make something that I like and no one else does...well, we always have bread and peanut butter on hand.
Wait. Are my kids not supposed to eat mac n cheese every night?
I have a 6-year-old and 3-year-old twins and they are all in the super-picky stage that makes me want to die by dinnertime. One day our power went out right before I was going to make dinner so I gave them all bowls of yogurt with granola and sprinkles and everybody was happy and there was no cleanup and it was a revelation. Otherwise, I have really embraced the popcorn and wine dinner after bedtime.
I want variety. I try to plan a mix of meat and meatless, different flavors (Italian, Mexican, Asian, etc) and sufficient amounts for a family of four plus leftovers for lunches. This is mentally exhausting, so I ask for help in coming up with ideas and planning for the week (we are trying to limit grocery shopping to once a week still.)
My kids would eat this 7 nights a week, given the choice: https://naturalgreenmom.com/healthier-mississippi-pot-roast-slow-cooker-recipe/ I like it, but I'm not putting it in the rotation more than once a month. Their other suggestions tend to be chicken strips, pasta with red sauce and mac&cheese.
My husband's input, whenever I ask for ideas is, "Well, why don't we just grill some burgers or something." I finally raged out at this answer, which is not actually an answer, in that it's something I easily could come up with on my own and the fact that I don't on a weekly basis means I do not want to eat burgers every damn week.
I'm looking forward to putting soup back in the mix as the weather cools.
We joined a CSA this year and got a Sitka Salmon membership. By "we" I mean "I." My husband is a great cook and was supportive of us joining. I'm the one that is scouring our cookbooks or the web to find ways to use that third round of collard greens or japanese turnips before they go directly to the compost bin. When he has expressed some displeasure at whatever is in front of him, I have had to resist not throwing the plate at him.
Rotate between same three options for breakfast and lunch, drop supper responsibility 100% on husband.
We have gone from being described as "foodies" to having serious conversations about the potential virtues of Soylent shakes. The four year old only wants gardein nuggets...and pretzels. That's healthy, right?!?
Our family is me, my partner, & an almost 16 year old. Our before-times pattern, due to work schedules, was that I cook weekdays, my partner cooks weekends. This has mostly stayed. I applied for a CSA back in March and we're finally in, so I'm looking forward to experimenting with whatever they send. Last night, I made a big pot of black beans full of peppers from our garden, with rice and street corn on the cob. We'll have black beans for lunch leftovers for a few days—the teen will probably put them in burritos and my partner and I will throw then on a bed of greens.
Seriously, WHY do they want dinner EVERY day?? Even though I live in a place with four seasons, it’s always grilling season at my house, even when I have to shovel snow to get to said grill. This is partially because we all like grilled food, and partially because it creates way fewer dirty dishes. My instant pot is my other year-round dinner friend. When the weather gets chilly I re-incorporate sheet pan dinners into the rotation. My basic meal planning approach is entirely oriented around minimizing prep/chopping (baby carrots and mini potatoes ftw) and reducing dishes that need washing. Taste and variety? Ehhhh.
My challenge for the past several years is that my husband tries to stick to low carb, my son is a vegetarian and has never met a carb he didn't like, and my daughter is somewhere in between. We are at the sweet spot, though (kids ages 15 and 12) -- they cook for themselves during the day. (Getting them to clean up after themselves is . . . a work in progress.) I am mostly responsible for the evening meal, but occasionally my husband steps up.
During the early months of the pandemic, I made this bread every other day, but that tapered off as the weather got hotter: https://pinchofyum.com/homemade-cinnamon-swirl-bread
I don't do much fancy cooking in the summer (salads, corn on the cob, charcuterie). I really get into soups and roasted vegetables in the fall, which still a several weeks away here in Maryland.
Tonight I'm making this even though there is a 98.5% chance everyone in my family will hate burrata in which case sucks for them. And roast broccoli on the side. https://www.halfbakedharvest.com/orzo-carbonara/#bo-recipe
My house feels like an entire extra person in my family with it's unrelenting need for care - and the food portion of this weighs heavily: meal planning, grocery ordering, going back out for the vital ingredient that the nice instacart shopper can't find, figuring out what the kids will eat vs. what the adults will eat, getting it on the table in a reasonable amount of time...
When this whole thing started, I loved making meals. Then, I had a pandemic baby. Now, I'm thinking that the trade-off of takeout every other night and not putting away for the college funds may be worth it...
I used to love to cook, but right now I am ready for a week of all takeout, every meal. As it is, we are eating frozen stuff from Trader Joe's and the occasional vegetable or fruit before it goes bad.
Nice stuff.
We're just coming off two months living with my 86-year-old mother, a roll of the pandemic and familial relations dice in many ways--our daughter is 5, plus they have opposite schedules. But food, and who bought it and cooked it, and how it entered the house, were all points of potential conflict. My husband and I both love cooking and are good at it; my mother informed us she now "doesn't have a passion" for it, but acted sad when we told her in that case we'd cook the pork chops, etc. She also weighs under 100 lbs and always strictly controlled what both she and I ate when I was growing up. ANYWAY, it turned out that against her better judgement, my mother became an ardent fan of all the food my daughter loves best (that'd she'd never have bought in my childhood): cheesy Pirate's Booty, pepperoni pizza, and--the great leveler--Hood Unicorn Confetti Ice Cream Sandwiches. All of these were great points of intergenerational connection between them. Was I a bit smug about her conversion to these foods? Indeed I was! I tried very hard to be gracious about it. By our last week, my mother was sneaking a Unicorn Confetti Ice Cream Sandwich, washed down with cheap sherry, while watching The PBS Newshour at earsplitting volume.
I punted dinner on Wednesday night because <waves arms> and got the kids Chick Fil A and ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while staring out the window, wondering how we got here. I did not remember the pound and a half of chicken breasts that I had defrosted in the microwave that I intended to grill and use on a salad or something until the next day.