Photo courtesy of Pam Wilson.
The author with her son in the kitchen.
I’m not very good at organizing family meals. Having grown up in the 70s when convenience was all the rage, I was never taught about meal planning or preparation. Over the years I’ve learned what my family will eat and what they will throw away. Having worked in low-income areas, it always saddens me when we throw good food away, so I’ve tried to cook what my family will actually consume. This isn’t to say that we suffer through recipes that don’t exactly excite my husband and kids. There are times when we’ve all looked at each other and said, “No way!” And scrambled eggs it is.
When my son Joe came home over winter break after traveling his freshman year of college, he told me I needed to “kick it up a notch.”
I just smiled.
There would be no kicking it up in this kitchen. Jessie stopped eating fish (she was an amazing eater as a toddler), my husband Kenny won’t eat green vegetables, and Joe doesn’t like grilled chicken. What’s left?
I am not, and will not be, a short-order chef.
Joe returned to college and continued to travel, calling every once in a while to tell me about all the amazing food he was eating. The best call was the one I got from Greece. “Mom, we’re eating the wrong gyros! The best ones are in Turkey, not Greece!”
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we were still preparing and eating pretty much the same old fare.
When Joe came home in August for a month he announced that there needed to be at least four things on the table for dinner. Are you serious, I thought?
And so I pulled out my recipe notebook and cookbooks and sat down to Google. Gradually, I understood that he was asking for a more well-rounded meal. So I threw some energy into meal planning and preparation. After a month of it all I can say is, “I’m exhausted!”
Dinners that once took less than thirty minutes were now taking more than an hour to prepare. I was grilling salmon and vegetables, making homemade hummus, baking gnocchi with spinach, taco bakes, grilling tuna three ways, sautéing spinach with garlic, spinning up sweet potato soufflé, roasting broccoli, grilling corn, using the slow-cooker, whipping up every kind of cous cous I could find for every meal, trying French recipes for foil-pack-fish and vegetables and using more spice and onion than I have in a decade.
And my calculations about portions were all off. Preparing for three of us now exploded exponentially as Joe ate as much as the three of us combined. My food budget was blown the first week.
While this has been a challenging food time (not to mention expensive), in the end I was glad to be in the kitchen preparing meals for our family on a more regular basis. It took more time and energy than that homemade baby food from nineteen years ago. But I realized that the two times felt very similar. It was about learning and changing with the needs of a growing family. Still, tonight? We’re ordering in.
