Why I gave a cooking 4 years ago and never looked back
When I had my second child, I had to take a serious audit of my life and decided I had to let go of some things. Time was increasingly scarce and I wanted to spend it with my kids instead of the doldrums of “adulting.”
While most people would jump to hire a house cleaner or landscaping services, I decided cooking was the thing to get the ax and give me my time back.
For context, I only started to enjoy cooking in my late 20s after a decade of surviving off of chips and hummus. When I moved in with my now husband, I was incredulous that he ate three whole meals a day. What insane upkeep! I declared that would never be me, but eventually I fell into that rhythm of three meals per day.
Before we had kids, I discovered the fun of hosting and with that came along exploring new recipes. My friends were eager and kind taste testers and would provide honest feedback that helped me refine a growing portfolio of crowd-pleasing recipes. I was known for hosting dinners with elaborate, often experimental recipes with a less than 100% success rate, but it was fun nonetheless.
But after my second was born, we were in the height of Covid and hosting was a thing of the past. I realized cooking also needed to be in my rearview mirror.
I didn’t fully revert to eating exclusively chips and hummus, but instead we found a rhythm in becoming our take on an “ingredients household.” An ingredients household is typically known as a joke about your parents who never have any processed food in their house, only ingredients. Basically if you want cookies, you have to bake them yourself.
In our house, we took that to a new level though, and we eat ingredients for dinner. A fancy term, for it would be a charcuterie, but we aren’t fancy, so it’s “ingredients dinner.”
When you’re trying to please three different pallets of children under the age of six, you will resort to whatever is easy and makes sense. Why would I make an entire cooked meal that only two or three out of the five of us will actually eat? Instead, we do a hodgepodge of ingredients and use the following rules for each meal.
The first thing you have to say when you sit down is thank you for the meal. You are not allowed to start the meal by complaining.
Every meal must have these three components: a grain, a fruit or vegetable, and a protein. If a child does not like one of the items, they can swap it out for something in the same food group, but only after taking a sizable taste of what is already on their plate.
If I’m feeling abundant with energy on a weekend afternoon, I will make a chili that is adult appropriate or roast some vegetables to have on hand for an easy salad. Other than that, our meals are assemble-as-you-go. For adults, it usually takes the form of a salad or smoothie but adults have to abide by the rules as well: meet all the food groups and no complaining!
One day, cooking will return to my repertoire, and I look forward to it, but in the meantime, I just can’t justify the time on it. The amount of satisfaction and joy I get out of it compared to the time input just doesn’t balance out right now. I know that will change one day, but in the meantime,this works fine for our family.
What concessions did you make when your kids were young around food? How do you minimize stress in this area?
