Adventures in Cooking

I love baking.  For many reasons.  The first reason is because I have a hard-core sweet tooth.  If you think I'm kidding, you can ask my mom why the dining room sugar bowl was always empty when I was growing up despite rarely using the china dishes.  When I needed a little treat, I use to help myself to spoonfuls of sugar out of the dining room sugar bowl.  I'm not joking.  Recently, my younger sister also confessed to doing this, so a sweet-tooth clearly runs in the family.  The other reason I like baking is that if you follow the recipe, you're almost always guaranteed beautiful and tasty results. 

I like cooking, but its not as much fun.  When I first got married, I felt really threatened by the fact that my husband LOVED to cook and was good at it.  He prefers to be the one cooking.  Even now, he can hardly stand to be home and not be the one in the kitchen doing the cooking.  In my newlywed naivete, I called my mom and expressed frustration that Jon was trying to do my "job" (the cooking).  Some of the best advice she ever gave me was to not say anything and to never complain about Jon cooking.  She promised me that some day I would be glad that he wanted to cook.  Boy was she right!

When I first became a stay-at-home mom, I figured I would magically begin to love cooking and have dinner ready when Jon got home from work.  I was wrong.  Dead wrong!  4pm to 6 pm has always been The Witching Hours at our house.  The kids are up from naps, but not really happy or they are bursting with energy.  Either way, its not the calm, quiet cooking environment I pictured.  To be honest, my house is rarely calm or quiet. 

Fast forward a few years and a few more kids, I am still not the stay-at-home mom that has dinner on the table.  At least not more than once a week.  I do cook but my mainstays are tacos, wrap sandwiches, pasta (basically boiling noodles) and sauteing chicken.  Its not bad, but its not amazing.  Most nights, we feed the kids dinner and sit with them, but we don't actually eat with them.  Instead, we wait until they are all tucked into bed and then I sit on the couch and catch up on email while Jon cooks us dinner.  Its a good arrangement.  I like it and so does he.  But our dinners were getting later and later.

One of my goals for 2013 was to start cooking more for many reasons.  One reason was to keep us from eating takeout after the kids are in bed (at least that often) or going to a restaurant for both financial and caloric reasons.  Another reason was to get better at it. 

Another reason was that I wanted to eat healthier and more variety.  And, I really do like cooking, but I need a plan and I need to be able to prep food earlier in the day when its not CRAZY town at our house.  Last year, I discovered this website.  I tried a bunch of the recipes this past summer and they were all so good. 

I started this January with the goal to plan out our meals one week at a time with recipes from this website.  I'm not sure how long I'll do this.  Right now, we're still trying a lot of the recipes out for the first time, so once I know which ones we like and which ones we don't, I may not plan out menus on a weekly basis on an ongoing basis, but for now its working.  We already have several favorites including the Butternut squash, sausage & spinach pasta, Shrimp Pad Thai on the lighter side, and Spaghetti Squash with cheese.  And when I say "we", let me be clear.  I mean Jon and I, not the kids.  The kids do not eat shrimp and despite my many, MANY, many attempts, they do not eat squash, zucchini or potatoes (other than the french fry form).  They do eat lots of foods, but they are stuck on what they are use to and things without sauces.  I am usually able to adapt some of the food for them by leaving the sauce off of their portion, but sometimes with the casseroles, there is no adaptation.

I continue to have the boys try a bite of each of these new dishes, even if I'm 100% confident that they will not like it.  Let me be honest: Andrew almost always gags and runs to the trash can with his bite.  Yay!  Its a super fun element to our family dinners. 

Aaron is a little better.  I'm actually convinced that Aaron does like some of the foods, but that seeing his older brother throw it up in the trash can convinces him otherwise. 

James has taken to really trying to like whatever he is tasting.  His face will be all grimace but he'll say its pretty good, but not his favorite.  Sometimes he'll go as far as claiming that "it tastes good but that he wants to make sure he saves enough for the rest of us."  I'll give him an A for effort and for playing the game of verbal manipulation.

Most nights Caleb flat out refuses food (even ones he eats regularly) by shaking his head no and refusing to open his mouth.  Other times, he'll try it, spit it out and then throw it on the floor.  Tonight at dinner, he pelted me with his pieces of string cheese for several minutes.  Ah...the joys of having a toddler around at dinnertime.

Cooking is still somewhat stressful to me as its not intuitive and I seem to make the most ridiculous messes.  If there was a contest for who dirties the most pans and dishes while cooking dinner, I'm sure I'd win.  So, in addition to lots of cooking, I've also been doing obscene amounts of dish washing too. The good news is that we've found a bunch of new dishes that we really like and I'm having some fun too.  Jon seems to like it too, although I secretly think he is wishing he was doing the cooking. 

The kids might not be as excited about my new cooking skills.  So, in closing, I'll share with you a dinnertime prayer that the boys were offering up pretty regularly a few months ago and that might make a comeback at our house.

Dear Jesus,

Please help this food to taste good.

Amen