I Wonder What My Kids Are Having For Lunch

180 days, August through June, I pack four lunches.  Sandwiches, quesadillas, bowls of rice - I try to pack a variety.  Some cookies or chips, a box of milk or juice, a bottle of water, a bag of grapes. I think I do pretty good for my own fast-food to-go operation.  Add to this the to-go dinners on sports practice and game nights.  So when summer comes - the folks are on their own.

I don't think I've made lunch since the last school bell. I do my part - I buy bread, sliced turkey, cheese, hot dogs, peanut butter and other random lunch fixin's.  And because of morning swim practices, I haven't really been on schedule to cook breakfast, either. But I do sometimes because I love a hot biscuit and a bowl of grits every now and then.  In general, however, I assume that at some point, my able bodied children will realize that they are hungry, amble from the couch all the way to the kitchen and fix themselves something to eat.

I used to feel guilty about not making them breakfast, lunch and dinner during the summer months. What if they whither away to nothing, go back to school all emaciated and CPS comes looking for me?  I've since decided that that's not even a close possibility.  I've determined that I am not abandoning my children, I'm teaching them to feed themselves.

Yes, there are some days that its about 5 o'clock where one of them realizes that they haven't eaten all day and hey, what is Mommy going to do about it?  But for the most part, someone hears their stomach grumble, remembers that someone has already done the hunting and gathering, and all they have to do is put it all on a couple slices of bread.

They seem to be surviving.  Next step - get them to make me something, too.

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#DIY Cookbooks: Recipe Binders for Favorite Recipes

Pasta, dessert, soups, seafood. Did I say dessert? I really enjoy cooking – the more ingredients and chopping and mixing the better.  And what goes along with this love of cooking? Cookbooks, magazines, and torn out from anywhere recipes. Over the years of collecting such things, I looked up one day to realize that recipes have taken over a kitchen cabinet, the counter, the desk.

The situation: I have years (okay, over a decade; I’m sharing, don’t judge) of Cooking Light magazines, travel souvenir cookbooks, specific food cookbooks, organizational fundraising cookbooks, those promotional pamphlet-ish cookbooks.

The problem: With too many recipes, I never get around to all of them, or even a majority of them, because there’s no easy way to catalog them.

De-cluttering:

• I’ve tossed the promotional pamphlet-ish cookbooks from food brands and specialty kitchen stores.  Just because.
• I’ve tossed or put in the donation pile the fundraising cookbooks.  I guess there was a fad at some point in which organizations had all of their members and supporters write their favorite recipe and compiled them all into a book to raise money for their programs.  Nice idea, nice fundraising option, but I really don’t need more recipes for tuna casseroles and doctored up box cake recipes.
• I’ve kept the cookbooks that I’ve purchase when traveling because, in addition to yarn, those are my kind of travel souvenirs.  Commander's Kitchen and Emeril's from New Orleans, a waffle cookbook in Dutch from Belgium, Korean cookbooks from a bookstore and coffee shop in Seoul.
• I’ve also kept my other “real” cookbooks, i.e. published and bound cookbooks.  This includes Maya Angelou's cookbook, one all about shrimp & grits, and few from various Junior League chapters (a southern one has the best Kahlua recipe in it.)  The ones I just didn’t like anymore for whatever reason I put in the donation pile.

What about that decade’s worth of Cooking Light? Its online, they have a website, I can search for any recipe I want. I probably threw out the whole lot, right? Nope.  I went through the magazines and pulled out the recipes I’ve either tried at some point or really anticipate making in the near future.  And I realized something while going through about 100 magazines: there are a lot of repeats and variations of the repeats. I guess that’s not too surprising – how many ways can you really make baked chicken, baked tilapia, or pasta, shrimp, and lemon?  So I didn’t keep every version of chicken alfredo or baked broccoli casserole.  Or the annual update on making the perfect tomato sauce (hint, starting with canned tomatoes are acceptable.)

I slipped all those torn out recipes into plastic sleeves and ordered them in a couple 3-ring binders.  The plastic sleeves are important so that the pages don’t get torn as I flip through or messed up when I cook.  The cover is simple - printout of a fun food reminder and scrapbook paper.

Use plastic sheet protectors and a 3-ring binder to collect favorite recipes.

One binder is divided like a regular cookbook – meats, side dishes, breads, breakfast, etc.  One binder is all desserts which I'll divide into cookies, cakes, pies, frozen sweets, and other stuff.

Collect reminders, lists, and recipes in one binder for the holidays.

I also have a holiday book which includes recipes that I only make during the holidays (cranberry sauce, sweet potato pies, etc.), as well as other holiday to-do reminders, and Christmas card lists.  The cover art? A pre-school art project made by one of my kids (another great way to preserve and use those art projects.) 

How’s it working? I’ve already used a newly re-discovered recipe to make biscotti for my recent cookie exchange.

Now, if I could only find a simpler way to wash and put away all those dishes.

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Study Shows Home-Cooked Meals Cause Mother Stress

A new study suggests that cooking meals is a stress factor for mothers, particularly in the list of things good mothers do.

It took a team of researchers a 1 ½ years to figure that out.  They could’ve spent a week in my house and went on to use the rest of the 77 weeks making ground-breaking discoveries such as getting children out of the house for school in the morning is stressful, transporting kids to after-school activities requires a lot of family time juggling, and getting curly-haired girls to sit down to get their hair down is the cause for many many adult and child-sized tears.  But back to this study.

Some of the mothers they talked to were working poor, trying to prepare home-cooked meals in a cockroach-infested hotel bathroom or a trailer being taken over by ants, or without reliable transportation to the grocery store to buy fresh fruit.  Yes, I would believe that a home-cooked meal is a source of worry for these moms. But the bigger stressor seems to be having a decent home.  I’m sure a lot of things cause you gray hairs when you are in such financial dire straits.

The middle-class mothers also reported that this notion of feeding the family is a burden because they have to plan meals that meet each family’s members personal tastes. Really?  Where is that written in the mom-handbook?  Catering to each person’s preference is a (modern) mom-made stressor, myself included. Even making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches requires referring to my mental notes of preferences – one PB & strawberry jelly, one PB & grape jelly, one PB only, on strawberry jelly only. Sheesh!  But when it comes to the more complicated stuff, like dinner? It’s pretty much take it or get yourself a bowl of cereal.  We do our kids some kind of disservice letting them think that the home kitchen is their own personal restaurant.  Sure, they may hide the peas under the mashed potatoes every now and then, but isn’t that better (for the mom) than making a serving of peas, another serving of broccoli, a spinach salad, and a pot of collard greens just to make everybody happy?  Kids need to learn that they don’t get their way all the time and figure out solutions to deal with that reality, even if it does mean sneaking a brussel sprout into a napkin every now and then.

Additionally, our busy lives makes the idea of going grocery shopping, bringing it all home, cooking something delicious, and serving it on one table to the entire family at one time an exercise in breaking the time continuum.  (How many researchers did this take to figure that out?)  In fact, my latest mom-freak out was looking at my son’s swim schedule this season and realizing that swim practice is at 6 o’clock pm (the proper dinner time) four days a week.  This, after I loaded to our calendar the girls’ tennis and basketball schedules.  And my PTA and sorority meetings. And dad’s work travel schedule.  We’re never going to eat dinner at the table as a family for the next year.

The researchers of the study gave some recommendations for solutions that have yet to be available (to-go dinners provided by the schools) or that seem financially unfeasible, like eating from food trucks (because surely someone who is living in a buggy hotel has the funds to eat out every night - not).

In my research, which has taken about 15 years and involved my circle of friends, here’s a few solutions that the busy mom might find helpful to relieve some of the stress of feeding the household.  I don’t do them all, all the time, but when I have, I found they help.

• Plan meals for the week in relation to the family schedule. Include breakfast, lunch, and a plan to make use of leftovers.
• Make a grocery list to support the meal plan and use coupons.  I’m not the super-couponer, but saving even a few dollars each trip helps.
• Make use of the crockpot. This is a busy family’s magic food cooker – put a bunch of stuff in it in the morning, with a little liquid of some sort, turn it on and voila – dinner.  I’ve posted my Crockpot Spaghetti and Asian Chicken recipes, to give you a few ideas.
• Use some pre-cooked or pre-prepared ingredients. Pick up a bag of salad, a rotisserie chicken, and make some pasta when you get home.
• Teach the children to cook.  You can be doing laundry or something if you let the kids boil the spaghetti or batter the chicken. Do not, however, feel compelled to cook with your children because this can cause even greater stress.
• Cook for tomorrow.  After everyone’s gone to bed and you’re piddlin’ around the house, put a chicken or a roast in the oven, cook the pasta for tomorrow’s dinner.  Nothing says you have to cook at 5 pm.
• Do plan every now and then for the meal out. Because sometimes you just are not home to even cook the home-cooked meal.

And moms, one thing to really relieve some stress?  
Realize that everything does not have to be ready for Cooking Channel and Pinterest. You do not have to have garnish and a perfectly plated meal. You do not have to cut all your vegetables to look like a beautiful sunrise to entice the kids to eat it. The real point of the family meal is the gathering of family to break bread together. Yes, you hovering over the hot stove all day is a nice, housewife-y touch, but isn’t really a requirement.  Make it healthy, make it something at least some of the people like, and be proud of yourself that you made it through another day.

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