The Meals.

Oh the meals.

I love to eat and I love to cook. I really get inspired when I read about food or cooking or gardening or any of those good food-related things, and I love taking time and experimenting in the kitchen. I love the feeling of having made a whole bunch of food, and I theoretically love the idea of sharing it with my family and friends.

But lately, I am not so into it. I am not sure why – perhaps it’s because I have to do it, or because I am kind of tired and frazzled all the time. Maybe it’s because when I cook, I usually get to the penultimate moment (pots are at the right temperature on the stove, ingredients are about to go in and be stirred, things urgently need to be chopped) when Rosie parks herself between my knees and the counters and my darling sweet amazing Nora all of a sudden turns into a cartoon toddler, whining to come ‘Uppy mama!’ and clinging to my legs. Sometimes she falls to the kitchen floor and wails, face down, dramatic, and sometimes (the good times) she wants to drag a chair over and stand next to me while I cook. This is great but not conducive to fast cooking. She makes her own concoctions out of the discarded veggie scraps (a favourite is red peppers stuffed with whatever garbage she can find, like mushroom stems and onion skins) or just grabs and eats fistfuls of whatever ingredients (especially grated cheese, which she eats like cookie monster) I am trying to work with.

So mealtimes are a bit stressful.

Adding to the stress, because of our wacky schedules Nora eats earlier than hubby and I. Hubby gets home juuuuust a bit too late for Nora to wait. This was a fine and acceptable arrangement because theoretically, Nora goes to bed much earlier than us, and because she was pretty much eating baby food – low-spice, soft, small portions, not incredible variety - so we didn’t want to eat the same food as her anyway. I ended up cooking two meals in a hurry – the first one harried because an over-hungry Nora is no fun at all (see falling to the floor wailing, above) and the second because our dinnertime would conflict with bedtime preparations. Unacceptable! Sometimes hubby cooks but he finds it much more stressful than I do and makes a giant mess in the process. His strength is pizza night (Thursdays); he is great at making our pizzas. And he does the nightly cleanup, usually after I crawl off to bed.

I need to get a handle on this situation. Store-bought prepared foods are a no-go for me, even in the busiest weeks. And I get super depressed when my produce rots in the crisper because I couldn’t get my act together and create some meal out of it.

I improve things by about 50% when I take the time on Sunday night to plan dinners for the whole week. I can plan to have a dinner each of beef, chicken, pork, fish/seafood, Pizza night and vegetarian (we sometimes double up on chicken or seafood, rarely on beef or pork with the exception of pepperoni). I can plan to have one meal on Monday that will make a dinner for Nora on Tuesday. I can sometimes plan to have some things made in advance – sometimes. So that is a good first step. I make the list on Sunday, post it to the board on the fridge (a stick-on whiteboard on our fridge helps us to keep organized), and then I write out a grocery list accordingly. I am so anal that I will actually write the grocery list in geographic order (by placement in the grocery store), so that when hubby or I do the groceries after work on Monday it takes about 20 minutes max. It really bugs me when the IGA thwarts my plans by moving stuff around. SOMETIMES I will base this plan on what’s on sale that week but I find that’s just one too many factors. I often base it on what kind of meat we have in the freezer. In the morning when I leave, I use the little weird system we’ve developed where I leave signs we have made of cardboard and popsicle sticks saying “CHICKEN” (for example – the back of it says “FISH”) sticking out of hubby’s travel mug, and he gets said meat out of the freezer before he leaves and pops it into the fridge to thaw for the day. It’s weird but it seems to work, because in the morning frenzy neither of us can remember to communicate the message to the other. We’re too busy wrestling the toddler into her clothes and convincing her that daycare isn’t evil.

So I do that about 7 weeks out of 10. Not too bad.

I improve my life quite a lot when I make a big batch of a Nora-friendly meal and freeze it in small portions. A long time ago I baked little healthy (packed with veggies and pumpkin puree and ground flax seed and oatmeal etc) meatloaves, frozen in muffin tins. She liked that just fine because my girl likes beef. I made a veggie/lentil stew and froze that too, in baby food jars, and that went down ok with a dollop of yoghurt on top and a side of either crackers or toast with butter. I need to have dinner options for Nora that I can just take out of the freezer, pop in the toaster oven or microwave, and give her right away because often we fart around outside after work/daycare and only come in to eat, and by that time it’s almost too late (see wailing on the floor, above) I have 15 minutes MAX. Some other options that we like include jars of leftover butter chicken pre-mixed with rice, little containers of frozen homemade cheese sauce (I boil up some healthy pasta – kamut or something else crunchy like that – with some broccoli or peas, warm up the cheese sauce and just mix it together), fish cakes (made from leftover dinner trout that hubby caught), and whatever frozen casserole leftovers we might have kicking around. Sometimes I will whip something up in the moment, like a tiny one-egg omelette with veggies and multigrain toast or a yogurt mashed potato with broccoli and cut-up meatballs, but I much prefer the frozen option.

Then usually, if she’s up late enough, she eats a second dinner with us, poaching our dinners from our plates like a baby vulture.

This plan is evolving. It’s evolving because of two things: 1) Nora has started eating slightly larger portions, so I have to adjust my jars/portions accordingly. Maybe I have to start using small mason jars instead of baby food jars, and 2) she has started eating some more interesting things and tolerating spices. Hubby and I eat a lot of spicy food – standards at our place include pad thai, Singapore noodles, fajitas, spicy BBQ pork tenderloin, grilled chicken sandwiches with chipotle mayo – hence my need to make Nora her own dinners. Once she spat something out and said “it burn me” because it had one chili flake on it. Oops, my bad. But lately she’s into it; she will eat her own fajita and pick at my Singapore noodles. We had curry the other day – not the hottest curry in the world, more like a yellow English curry with raisins – and she liked it so much she ate it for dinner the next day. We shared a pork stir-fry last week as well. So that is getting moderately easier. She will as happily eat rice, couscous, and tortillas as she will eat mashed potatoes and pasta. She is 78% composed of hummus. Eating with Nora is becoming a lot of fun.

In writing this post, I have talked myself into caring about food again. I have also been inspired by Pinterest to kick it up a notch, maybe use my crockpot a bit more to ease the burden now that fall is upon us. I am going to make a stew and freeze it. I am going to re-do the little muffin tin meatloaves. I am going to make make-ahead oatmeal for her daycare breakfasts, and start doing things like keeping pre-grilled meats and sauces around. I am going to mince up a mango and freeze it in ice cube trays, puree a squash to freeze and add to this and that, and buy some long-lasting produce like carrots and beets.

All I need is a day, a day when the pantry is stocked, the kitchen is clean, I can sip a glass of wine while cooking and nobody’s hanging off of my pant leg.