Getting Out of the Desperation Dinners Rut

I don’t really like to eat. Seriously, if I could take a pill every day that gave me the appropriate caloric and vitamin intake I would happily never eat again. Or maybe only once in a while when I wanted a good cheeseburger.

Unfortunately, I have four kids and a husband who do not feel the same way about food as I do. They want to eat. Three meals a day, 365 days a year. So inconsiderate of them, isn’t it? How I feel about that?:

Feeding a family of six is not easy. I have one kid who loves spicy food, but one whose palate really can’t handle it. I have one child who just wants healthy foods, another who just wants gravies, sauces and starches. I also have one who is smart enough to slip what she doesn’t like to the dog. And considering the dog is pushing 100 pounds, maybe I should keep a closer eye on that.

I don’t prepare separate foods for the kids – they eat what we’re having or they don’t eat.  I did allow the kids to pick one food that they don’t ever have to eat. Their choices:

Kid #1 – Mashed potatoes

Kid #2 – Stuffing

Kid #3 – Squash

Kid #4 – Peppers

Although I pretty much think their choices are crazy, I work around these “least favorite foods” and everybody stays relatively happy. Except the child who wants to put Ranch dressing on everything, from pizza to vegetables to casseroles. Sigh.

I do cook because going out to eat regularly with a family of six, three of them with significant appetites, gets expensive quick.  I’ve never really understood why people ask if someone can cook? Anyone who can read can cook. Maybe not the most delicious, complex meals on the planet, but they can brown some ground beef and make some tacos or boil water and make spaghetti.

So can I cook? Yes. But am I very creative with it? Not always. Not even usually. Let’s put it this way, my two main cookbooks for the last ten years have been: Help! My Apartment has a Kitchen! and Desperation Dinners. 

In an attempt to get out of the cooking rut I’ve been in since..., well, forever, the last few months I have resolved to try one new recipe per week.  That has gone well some weeks (who knew you could cook babyback ribs in the crock pot and they would turn out AWESOME????). But there were other times not so great, like when I almost burnt the house down cooking curry.  

Other new recipes have included chicken and dumplings, broiled tilapia parmesan, homemade bbq chicken pizza, garlic cheddar chicken, potstickers, black bean enchiladas, Philly cheese & beef casserole and Mexican street corn. Some have been more popular or successful than others, but no matter what, we have tried them together as a family. And then sometimes tossed them and made PB&Js – but again, together as a family.

Tonight’s new recipe? Fish tacos. We’ll see how that goes – kids are not thrilled. But at least it’s new and different. And will hopefully delay my search for the food pill a little while longer.  

Making Room for Failure

Last week my 11-year-old daughter auditioned for a play at a local children’s theater. She did well enough at the first audition to receive a call back the following night for dance. We found out at the call back the play was set on a Caribbean island and most of the dancing was African-based moves. So I watched (since they left the doors to the rehearsal hall open) as my blond, mostly rhythm-less, whiter-than-white daughter tried to do these African moves. 

It became apparent to me after just a few moments that this was going to go poorly.  Like really bad. And it did. After an hour of watching my daughter try and fail, and try and fail, to do these moves, I was a basket case.  It was obvious that she wasn’t right for the show.  I just wanted to sweep her up and take her where no one could make her feel less than perfect. But that wasn’t my job at the moment. My job was to allow her to fail.

Allowing our children to fail is perhaps one of the hardest jobs we have as parents. But if you carry them through everything, they never learn to walk sure-footedly on their own.

Fast forward to last night at dinner. As part of my “try a new recipe every week” resolution, I decided to make Indian Chicken Curry – a favorite of my husband’s and something I had never made or even tried before.  It was much more involved than most of the meals I usually fix.

How the heck do you cook with this?

It became apparent to me after just a few moments that this was going to go poorly.  Like really bad. And it did. There I was running around the kitchen like an episode of Worst Cooks in America: chopping onions, dicing potatoes, trying to stir the curry paste mixture (who knew you had to mash the “paste” so you wouldn’t have chunks of it in the sauce?  They should say so on the box. IN ENGLISH). I put the oil on too early and my onions weren’t all chopped, so I was darting back and forth, trying to chop and stir at the same time. Stuff was burning at the bottom of the pan. My youngest three children were hopping in and out of the kitchen, taking perverse delight in telling me how gross everything looked.  And all the while I’m trying to figure out HOW THE HECK you get fresh minced ginger out of ginger root. Seriously – have you seen ginger root? That’s not even right.

I turned to find my daughter looking at me with what I suspect was the same look I had for her last week at the audition.  That "I-want-to-step-in-here-before-you-crash-and-burn-but-know-that-I-need-to-let-you-just-figure-out-this-mistake-on-your-own" look. Sometimes you just have to let your parents fail. If you carry them through everything, they never learn to walk sure-footedly on their own.

In the end, there’s good news: my daughter wasn’t cast in the Caribbean island show, but WAS cast in Willie Wonka – a much better fit for her and her talents. The other good news: Pizza Hut delivers.