Cooking for the Family

One of the hardest transitions I've made is switching to the mode of planning family meals. I've lived alone (mostly) since 1981, and I have only needed to satisfy myself in the kitchen. Since I happily eat almost anything, this was really easy to do. I fell out of the habit of having actual meals a long time ago. By that I mean, I didn't make multiple things for me to eat. I've been pretty much a one-dish consumer of food for decades. When asking myself "what's for dinner?" the answer would generally be one single word. Sometimes there were multiple ingredients, but it usually ended up all smooshed together.

Now, I've got to make family dinner four or five nights a week. We don't often sit down to eat on Friday or Saturdays, but I have very strong motivation to make sure we have dinner at the dining room table together. That means not only actually cooking, but shopping, storing, and planning how to pull it together when I don't usually get home from work until six.

I know most women end up doing this for a couple of decades without thinking too much about it - it's just the way life is for most people. But for me it was a shift, and so I've had to think my way through how to make it happen. For most of last year, I was thrilled to simply be able to put something on the table the kids would actually eat. I didn't think about what I wanted or what I was eating - no time or energy to spare for that. The fact is, the kids like things that are surprising to me, but each has their idiosyncrasies that add up to my believing at one point that there was no single food on the planet all three kids would eat. Except lobster, and I won't kill my meals myself, so that was not a possibility.  Finally we've settled on a few acceptable meals in rotation, but if any one of them happens too often, they decide against it for a while. They like to cook, but not to make family meals. If I push too hard on the "if you don't like it, make your own friggin' food" then the whole sitting down together thing is going to fall apart.

At least I don't have anyone threatening to become a vegetarian - we're all pretty much meat-atarians. I read a lot about food production a few years ago, and I decided I would only eat meat from happy animals. That mostly meant farmer's market and Whole Foods meat. When I started cooking for the family, I had to compromise a lot on that. The kids vetoed "grass-fed milk" - don't like the taste. The extra money for happy meat seemed excessive when it was for six or more instead of one. Eggs and chickens we eat still had happy lives until they became food. Pork mostly graces our table in the form of sausage, and that is at least organic. Lamb is a staple for us, and most comes from New Zealand with acceptable production, and I can get local at Whole Foods for fairly reasonable prices.  But beef--- I buy it on sale at Whole Foods when I can, but most of it is straight factory farming from CostCo. The price differential is just too much.

Most meals for the kids are meat and rice. Or meat and pasta. Or meat and bread. Less often, meat and potatoes. They like fish, and I'm trying to learn to cook it. (I like eating fish, but for some reason I've never liked dealing with uncooked fish. Some kind of phobia from fish gone bad in my past, I guess.)  Grilled meats, curries (lamb and chicken), ground meat with sauce (spaghetti, sloppy joes, tacos), all work well. Strong preference for red meat over chicken or turkey. They don't eat vegetables. They do eat fruit, and I've just decided not to fight a battle over "try one bite".

Since I've been trying to lose weight, I've re-introduced vegetables to the dinner table. I don't do salads, since I often eat one for lunch. But cooked vegetables can be easy. I have my idea of how the meal ought to fit together, so I don't just pull a vegetable out at random. I only buy fresh vegetables when I have a definite plan to serve it as part of a meal in the next couple of days. I've thrown out too many slimy black vegies to just have them hanging around, and I can't compost for fear of rats. I'm fine with frozen vegies rather than none at all. I pretty much skip the rice or pasta and use the vegie as a vehicle for the sauce, if there is any.  Sometimes I sneak vegies into the meat dish, in small discrete quantities, and always allow them to pick them out if they insist.

HS always takes a serving of vegetables. A pleasant surprise is that my oldest nephew has decided vegetables are a good thing. He always eats whatever I serve. Sometime in the last year he became interested in health and fitness, and clearly got the vegetables as miracle food story from somewhere.

This weekend I ended up with four trips to three different food stores.  I spent five hundred dollars on mostly meat at CostCo, refilling the freezer. That will last a while. I got fruit and fresh vegies at Whole Foods, along with lunch supplies for myself, and I got canned goods and staples at the local regular supermarket. I wrote out menus for every day this week.  There should be good variety to choose from for a few weeks into the future, but the hard work is figuring out what I have, moving it from the freezer to the fridge in advance, and filling in any gaps.

This is not quite a routine yet, but at least we're into a rhythm and I'm finding a balance between taking care of myself and everybody else too.