(no subject)

[rivka]

From the results of my poll, it seems that I am not a space alien - but neither is my friend. Which is about what I would have expected prior to our conversation.

What she found so incredible was that, most nights, I make a full cooked dinner for my family. ("Do you just really love to cook? ...Don't you ever just eat something bad? ...I just can't believe that you do it.") We sit down and eat at the table together, usually with a glass of wine for Michael and me, sometimes with candles lit. (Lest you think we're totally June-and-Ward Cleaver, the other end of the table is usually piled high with mail, books, nursery school projects, and miscellaneous cruft.)

I do really enjoy cooking, although I have to confess that when you do it almost every night there are times when all it is is work. I do find it satisfying to feed my family well. When I make something particularly tasty, I really glow. Part of what I enjoy is the sense of doing something concrete, hands-on, and real, which makes people feel good right away. Mostly the things I do with my time are a lot more nebulous than that, and the rewards or benefits are less clear.

The food I make is pretty simple. I don't use Rachael Ray's cookbooks, but I know a lot of recipes that take about a half-hour to make, and we mostly cycle through those. Some of them are pretty damn fancy (salmon with tropical fruit salsa, say, or pan-fried tilapia with soy-ginger sauce), but other meals are pretty much the sort of thing my Mom learned to cook in her 1950s-era home ec classes: say, broiled steak with mashed potatoes and peas.

Part of what enables me to cook at home nightly (or almost-nightly) is that I don't adhere to foodie-level standards. I use canned chicken broth, canned tomatoes, and spaghetti sauce from a jar. (It's the fancy kind of jar, at least, and I add meat and vegetables. But still.) We eat a lot of frozen vegetables. I buy tubs of pre-grated parmesan cheese.

I plan meals and do a major supermarket shopping once a week, with additional forays to a small neighborhood grocery store as needed. I shopped today. I was feeling stressed out at the time, so there's nothing particularly complex or adventurous on the menu. This week's meals:

Sunday: Michael had gaming, so it was just me and Alex. I don't really cook for just the two of us, because it drives me crazy to put in a lot of effort to make something and then have her refuse to eat it. Tonight we had frozen fish sticks, organic tater tots, and a choice of sauteed fresh spinach (me) or raw spinach (her). I haven't had fish sticks since I was a little kid, and was surprised to discover that they're actually kind of tasty.

Monday: Smoked-gouda-stuffed hamburgers, sauteed fresh spinach with sesame oil, steamed frozen corn.

Tuesday: Baked chicken thighs with garlic and herbs, mashed potatoes, steamed frozen peas.

Wednesday (teaching night): fried ham slice, Pillsbury biscuits, steamed frozen green beans.

Thursday: something with chicken breasts, to be determined later. Popular favorite cooking methods in our household include spreading them with dijon mustard, wrapping a slice of streaky bacon around them, and grilling them on the Foreman grill; or else dredging them in flour-and-parmesan-cheese, sauteeing them, and serving them with a lemon-parmesan pan sauce. Probably we'll have basmati rice and steamed fresh asparagus on the side.

Friday: Special dinner for Alex's birthday. Shrimp scampi pasta, probably a salad, and homemade cupcakes for dessert.

Saturday: The day of Alex's birthday party. After corralling five rampaging three-year-olds and entertaining their mothers as well, we'll probably want to order takeout for dinner.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I happen to think you're an excellent cook, at least based on my experience.

[windypoint.livejournal.com]

If that were my menu plan I'd probably be cooking enough chicken on the Tuesday and vegetables on the Wednesday to be giving myself a day off by just serving heated up leftovers and making instant gravy on the Thursday. I enjoy cooking, but I also like to have days off from it without spending lots of money on a meal out or a takeaway.

[namedphoenix.livejournal.com]

You are awesome.

I can't believe that you think that menu isn't spectacular.

I just made my menu for the week (felt good!) and I planned for all three meals, but here's my dinners, if you're interested.
-Frozen Ravioli with frozen spinach and canned alfredo
-Chicken Cesar Salad
-Sauteed Cabbage, and preparing a new recipe in my crockpot called Tangy Chicken (pineapple chunks and soy sauce and some other stuff)
-ECHO girls meeting will feed me
-Several options because of it being Friday night: Steak and broccoli with potatoes, Hamburger Helper, or eating at Yoli's. Regardless, I'm making myself strawberry shortcake from bisquick.

That is going to be a real accomplishment for me. I'm going to see how long I can do this. The fact that you can do all that, well, it's absolutely awesome.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

my weekly menu includes a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. soon it will switch to having a lot of salami and cheese sandwiches. also, at least once a week, my parents buy me dinner.

i am pondering starting to make something relatively big on sunday evenings and then parcelling it out over the week. i don't mind eating the same thing a bunch in a row (see above pb&j festival for evidence.).

[erisian-fields.livejournal.com]

Whoa! The smoked gouda stuffed burgers sound fantastic! Have you ever tried them on onion rolls or onion bagels?

Go download "Living Cookbook." It's awesome kitchen software. It comes with tons of recipes, but the REALLY cool thing about it is that you can pick your meals for the week and it will generate a shopping list for you. Holy smoke, is that saving me money on groceries!

I've been playing with it for days now. I've stolen a bunch of recipes from Food Network and have created my own recipes as well. I'm a week ahead on my meal planning since I figured out how easy it is to add a recipe to the calendar. The hard part is deciding what I want to cook.

[lissamc.livejournal.com]

I usually insist that the family sits down to table together for supper, so we get at least a half hour a day all in one place to connect. My son usually wants to eat buffet style, so he can watch his shows and play his games.

The past month has been incredibly hectic, with us all running six ways to Sunday, so I have given in on the buffet thing more often than not. Last night, Kevin requested a return to the family dining. He missed it.

Go family dining!

[tavella.livejournal.com]

There was a debate, I think in loligo's journal about cooking, spurred by an article in the NYT. And I thought they were being in their own way as condescending to working people as the locavores they were bitterly criticizing. Sure, it's nearly impossible to feed a family on $21 a week, but it's perfectly possible to cook adequately for a family on a fairly modest budget of time and money.

[ailbhe]

That menu would utterly flatten me. It sounds fabulous, but preparing it would definitely take me way, way too long. Making hamburgers in general is beyond me because it's fiddly to get them to bind; stuffing them as well would be... too complicated. Though since we mainly eat local veg, veg prep does take a fair bit of our food-prep time.

We generally have "some kind of meat (or eggs), potatoes or rice or pasta, two vegetables" as our basis for deciding if we're "balanced," but we don't do much interesting with them.

And I think we get food out most weeks, at least once. We don't have frozen food unless we cooked it ourselves earlier (unless frozen raw meat counts) so that's not something we do. My shopping principles won't allow it.

Now I'm inspired to go make bread; we've been eating showp-bought for days and I'm sick of it. Swings and roundabouts.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I've just been doing the same, planning for week's menus from my shopping. Apart from bread, I'm not going to have to spend any more money on food this week, including lunches.

I tend to cook (real food from raw ingredients) five or six nights out of seven.

[kate_nepveu]

I love fish sticks. One of the cousins has started bringing cooked-from-fresh fish filets to Polish Christmas Eve, and that's very nice, but give me crunchy fried fish any day.

People's different ways of dealing with food are fascinating. We tried planning menus a week in advance and gave up; we'd not feel like cooking one night, or leftovers would last longer than we'd planned, or *something*. Now we plan at most a couple days in advance. And we rely far more heavily on leftovers.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

There's no question that planning well is the key to eating well. It might be the single most important bit.

K. [second most important is having your produce in ready-to-eat condition before it goes into the fridge, so that the prep time once you want to eat it is minimal. My theory is that putting away the groceries should take as much time as buying them]