rivka | (no subject)

But at least I feel *guilty* about not cooking.

Um . . . no, but one of our goals is for me to do that. I don't, but doing so will be one of the signs that I am dealing with my depression. . .

I'm guessing the difference between the first and third questions encompasses "leftovers."

Since a) I live alone, and b) due to fibro, etc. I don't always have the energy to cook, what I try to do is make enough of something for a couple nights' worth of leftovers (frex sweet potato curry and rice, spaghetti, occasionally a roast or a meatloaf). If I factored that in, it would be at least 5 nights a week of home-cooked, from fresh ingredients.

Kinda depends on how you define "cooked".

We do our best to eat mostly healthy and wholesome food, but we're simply too busy to cook five nights a week. In a good week, we manage three or four.

Frequently enough, we simply throw money at the problem. One of our life-changing realizations has been that while buying fully-prepared meals (for instance, from the Whole Foods on our way home) is expensive compared to cooking from scratch, it's cheaper than eating out, or ordering delivery food. Since we're not going to get any less busy, we're not going to apologize for choosing to do this.

We go out/order pizza, at most, once a week. We almost never heat up a frozen box thing, and when we do resort to tater tots and soy chicken nuggets, we do a veg too; at that point, we're practically cooking!

But we do eat a lot of leftovers, and we do resort to quick noodles and pre-made sauce and things of that ilk, and super-easy black bean quesadillas are a weekly routine.

I'd say we full-on cook a *real* meal 2-3 times a week. Today I made sweet and sour pork.

I cook, because otherwise, I will not be eating. Joys of living alone.

I also don't own a microwave, which tidly manages to avoid a number of frozen dinners and box meals. (I do use a number of pre-prep things - Trader Joe's box soups, for example - but they're not quite the same. And I have mac and cheese and tuna for "argh, must eat, can't cook." days.

We eat home-cooked meals very consistently, made from ingredients that may be fresh, frozen, or canned depending on item and season.

Ed and I share the cooking; we split it almost exactly 50/50. Whoever doesn't cook is responsible for the cleanup after the meal. We menu-plan once a week, each choosing three items, and then I shop for groceries to match what we're making. We figure that one night we'll eat out or get pizza or takeout or something.

We had a similar routine pre-kids, when we both had jobs.

For convenience food, there are some things we cook extra of and freeze. We're having a freezer meal this Thursday (bean soup). As a last-ditch fallback for those days when everything goes to hell, we keep frozen pizzas in the freezer.

I am pretty sure that we are an anomaly, actually, both in terms of how much we cook, and the extent to which we divide the work. The routine of "person who doesn't cook, washes dishes" has kept things extremely even, because neither of us wants to get stuck with the dishes all the time. (I'll note that sick people are excused from cooking and cleanup, and when I had morning sickness Ed did ALL the cooking and all the cleanup and made me whatever I thought I'd like to eat, for two months or so. Ditto when I had a newborn; I think Ed did all cooking and cleanup for a month or two.)

Exactly. I mean, my dinners usually consist of salad, toast, and some form of egg and cheese. Which isn't preheating anything, but isn't really "cooking" either.

And since I'm living the theoretical ideal, let me just add that I attach no moral righteousness to my routine. This works for us. We like to cook. We like homemade food. We're less busy than many people. Etc. I'd say more but it's dinnertime...

Since we're not going to get any less busy, we're not going to apologize for choosing to do this.

What's to apologize for? Whole Foods has awesome prepared foods.

Edited 2008-04-06 22:38 (UTC)

I've stopped being upset that I'm not very motivated to do things that would be good for me. Like cook.

I have an intention to change that, but it's always a battle of willpower. And depression, the malaise of which is rather all-encompassing. But I make no excuses: I'm just a bad housekeeper.

While it depends on the week, it averages less than five, I think. Though definitions vary--if (for example)

cattitude roasts a chicken Sunday night, and on Tuesday we have cold leftover chicken, bakery rye bread, and pre-cut "baby" carrots, does that count as producing a cooked meal on Tuesday?

I admire and envy people who can work full time and do that much cooking. I might manage a little more if I skipped going to the gym--but I can pay someone to cook dinner in my place, and I can't pay them to do my workouts, not usefully.

We eat at home most nights, with food cooked from scratch. That was a decision made for several reasons -- philosophical, practical, financial and environmental among them.

Also, two out of three household members have allergies to very common foods (wheat, tomatoes) and making our own food from scratch is the simplest way of making sure nobody's going to be accidentally exposed to allergens.

We've been trying to eat less meat recently, and aim for 2 red meat, 1 white meat, 3 vegetarian and one fish meal per week. Seems to be working well so far.

My household is split into vegan and non-vegan components. Occasionally a non-vegan will cook a vegan meal for everybody, or a vegan will cook a vegan meal for everybody. My vegan partner has two dishes that zie cooked faithfully when I was finishing my novel, but I do most of the cooking. I used to do five nights a week, sometimes six, of home-cooked food from fresh ingredients, for four people, but it wore me out. And I don't have to leave the house to write, and I don't have any children.

P.

I think I need to investigate this concept. Thank you.

I think we eat in six times a week, mostly, but I won't swear that we never ever have takeout more than twice a week. But it's a whole lot rarer now that we have the house.

In the trailer, I did almost all the cooking, but now it's Mr. Mom's purview. I usually cook the big gaming dinner on Sunday, though.

I don't, at the moment, because (a) I'm the only one in the household and (b) I'm in rehearsals and so don't even come home after work.

However, I do make up a couple of large batches of home-cooked food every Sunday, and package it all up in serving-sized portions that I can reheat in the microwave at work. So I'm still getting cooked-from-scratch meals twice a day, they're just often the same meals every day.

Once the play is over, I'll return to my more usual practice of cooking 3-4 nights a week and dining the rest of the week on leftovers (because it's hard as hell to cook for one).

Edited 2008-04-06 22:54 (UTC)

I'm not going to answer because i live in cohousing and am not sure what counts as my household in this regard. Because we live in cohousing we do eat meals prepared from mostly fresh ingredients at least five nights a week. But i'm guessing that's a very different sort of thing from what your poll is looking for!

I would note that "my household" for meals is functionally two households with mostly-joint but not always food consumption.

There are four adults in the household; each of us is in theory responsible for preparing a meal one day a week. Tuesdays are too damn scattered for group something; often the night that games night is is an eat-out night (or a WF pre-prep night). Some days the 'in theory responsible' only feeds two or three of us in one of the two locations, leading to overpreparation or underpreparation. Sometimes we go on a run of mostly leftovers.

It's actually fairly complicated when glanced at, but seems to work reasonably well in practice.

Life will get even weirder when our farm share starts to pay out in vegetables ....

In my current household it doesn't happen. Mostly do to it being three housemates with varying schedules living together. It is hard to plan who will be home when and plan meals accordingly.

When growing up home-cooked meals were the standard with *maybe* one night a week that my family didn't have one. And even then it was generally a "fend for yourself" of scrounging around the house/leftovers.

As a single-person household I usually don't cook dinners that much in a week. But I like cooked (rather than cereal-with-stuff-on) breakfasts, and never really settled on sandwiches for lunch and so tend to build lunches out of 'real' food.

In summer I tend to prepare meals that are mostly salad with some no-heat-required protein added; I am counting this as 'cooking' since it requires similar levels of preparation. But I don't really count making bread in the breadmaker as 'cooking' even though it produces a very good result.

I also give myself a bit of leeway because although some of my food is ready meals/eating out/takeaway, some of my food is "Go to the park, see what edible stuff is growing, pick it, wash it, eat it." I'm aiming for once or twice a week on this, though it varies a lot with season. The fruit and nuts that I preserve in the summer and autumn are also eaten during the rest of the year. I used to do some gardening as well, and while growing some of my own vegetables hardly counts as 'cooking' I feel it belongs in the food production category of my life. Right now I don't have space for growing any food other than sprouted seeds, and I'm seldom organised enough for that.

I enjoy cooking and would like to do more of it, but when I spend 10-12 hours/day at my place of study and an hour commuting each way, then go out and do things in the evening, I simply don't have the energy or the time. Cooking things to freeze is useful but my freezer space is very limited, and also I teach all day on Sunday and so cooking for the week and weekends doesn't always work very well.

When I have no classes I cook more (with the exception of these past few weeks when I've been using 'spare' time caused by not having classes to find, rent and move into a new flat). When I am visiting others I cook more.

When I grow up I shall have an enormous chest freezer and pre-make many things.

Yes to all, but I love to cook, so I'm as much indulging a hobby as anything.

We get food from the fish and chip shop on Monday or Tuesday, whichever my partner has chosen for our library night that week. Whenever we visit the grandmothers we usually end up with some sort of purchased meal from a drive through fast food place, since the grandmothers are really too old to be easily catering to family gatherings and it doesn't seem right to skimp on the length of the visits. If I'm having trouble with fatigue and inability to stay awake, we buy a stirfry from the asian food hall or heat up a frozen lasagna. Sometimes the frozen lasagna is a homemade one put together when I made a bulk pasta sauce a few weeks before, sometimes it isn't.

Lunches are especially full of leftovers. We often eat leftover roast turned into yiros type rolls, leftover pasta or mashed potato turned into baked casseroles with some sausage cooked next to them in the oven and a few frozen peas heated up as a side. I deliberately produce leftovers in order to save myself trouble later. Sometimes, if the leftovers are great but there simply isn't enough of them I feed the kids leftovers, cook up some rice, and send my partner out to get a very hot curry the kids wouldn't like anyway.

I estimate that I average three evening meals a week that are what one would think of as fully homecooked meals from scratch, no leftovers, no fully prepared heat-and-eat convenience foods.