What's for dinner?
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood .... often the choice of what's for dinner is decided by what I buy the weekend before, and whether I've gotten an idea to try something new and adventurous. Which sounds like I'm making a bigger deal of it than is necessary, but we're pretty focused on getting our kids to eat good meals, including one who is pretty undersized, and a bust of a dinner turns into some disgruntled mumblings and bowls of cereal, not the worst thing in the world but for whatever reason that risk plus the energy and inspiration during a busy week to come up with something new that has a good chance of working for the majority of the family makes it seem like a decision between going for it and taking the road less traveled by vs. .....chicken nuggets ... spaghetti ,,, whatever your go to might be.
We don't go eat at friends' houses very often, so dont get a great deal of inspiration that way. The few times we do go, however, I pay attention and if we did it would be a good source of ideas for me I think. Occasionally we will try to mimic things we get from restaturants but not much, for whatever reason. Both my parents and my wife's parents, as well as my wife's sister, are pretty smart about food I think, so when we visit them I pay attention to their food ideas, in particular the things they make that our kids like, for example bacon and shrimp are big all-family favorites we stumbled on.
A lot of the experimentation happens in the summer: partly because we travel to family, etc., more in the summer, partly because our garden is going strong in the summer and there just seems to be more fresh food available. Really, though, the big variable is time. My wife and I get out an hour earlier in the summer and that often translates into finally getting time to go through the grocery store in a non-rushed way, look at stuff and speculate whether it might work for us, think about new combos or options. Somehow its a little embarrassing but if a store has an idea for something and presents we're more than willing to give it a shot - its almost like we cant even muster up the new idea, but once one is presented to us we're willing to give it a shot. For example chicken pot pie. It sounds like something that went out with TV dinners, but we happened to see one in one of our regular stores that had pretty solid ingredients and it has now become a semi-regular thing. Not in the real rotation per se, but maybe once a month. Sometimes inspiration will come when we discover we all like a single ingredient, like asparagus, and we will build around it. Even the youngest of our family love it when cooked with soy sauce and garlic, so we've extended that fact into any number of stir-fry like dishes using that as a starting point.
Regarding tension points and the meals we face at home, one is cost: we want good food but dont have much excess cash, we address that - or at least I do - with smaller portions of the good stuff. So we will split 2/3 or 3/4 of a pound of a fish or a steak or something vs a pound or a little more that would not be uncommon for two people to order. Often I'll try to save some for lunch the next day at work to make the $ stretch out longer without having to compromise spending on better food. Another point of tension is dealing with tired, hungry kids who have not seen you all day and want to play, etc. It's embarassing to not have been with your family, come home and seek the kitchen as a refuge, but both I and my wife have that feeling often. I do most of the cooking for dinner but often we find ourselves in a 'No I'll cook dinner' 'No really honey *I'LL* cook dinner. I *WANT* to cook dinner" because we both are seeking a little peace. Sometimes there are tensions as there are things that my wife and I would love to have for dinner but that the other does not like (me lamb or pork, her asian dishes with fish sauce), but in truth those tensions are smaller than I would have thought. There's a lot of great food out there, and we both have pretty broad palletts (sp?), so that we get enough variety and have discovered enough new things we both like without bemoaning the loss of a few personal favorites.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this blog!
ReplyDelete- It sounds like you're typically the one answering the question, "What's for dinner," correct?
- When you find a recipe that you like, either from a family member or from the store, how do you keep track of it for future reference?
- Coming up with new ideas is one of the harder or bad parts of your typical dinners... any other things fall on that list of "the bad & the ugly"?
Yes, I'm the one answering what's for dinner - planning ahead and pulling out a frozen thing the morning before, etc.. Its partly because my wife is covering things on other fronts - laundry, homework, lunch boxes - and its partly because I am honestly a bit of a control freak: I am very concerned about what the kids eat and maybe its part of being a control freak but I kind of think I'm right about decisions like this. All which my wife is only too happy to let me be in control of, as the alternative is her making all the meals!
DeleteWe don't really have a way of keeping track of a recipe. Sometimes on online sites one of us will save a recipe to our recipe box, but that's not that often actually. We'll remember something a family member made and call them up and ask what was in it or text them, and then we'll have it searchable in a device. We also have a 'magic' box where we put important scraps of paper, and if we see a recipe we like in a flyer (usually in the Whole Foods 365 monthly flyer) we cut it out and put it in the box. Most stuff we commit to memory after making it a few times.
Another feature of the good the bad and the ugly is trying to avoid making 5 meals for 5 different people. We didnt do that when I was growing up - we all ate what Mom made. But we fight against the temptation - and sometimes lose - to make whatever good thing that each person likes so we know everyone has a good thing. Put another way, if we made only good things that everybody - from age 4 to 45 - likes, we ..... would be eating maybe two things.
One other thing that crops up under the good the and the ugly is WHEN to eat. I usually get back home from work, want to check the garden, play catch with one of the boys, have a beer, basically not jump right into making dinner or, if I do, to do so at a leisurely pace. My wife likes to eat early or what seems early to me (I say it makes me feel like an old person), and more crucially the kids - one particular - has an issue where his mood goes south if he doesnt eat. So there's always a bit of tension about when we eat, and I usually end up losing just because I am outvoted and also because the kids need to eat.
The pasta two nights in a row is not typical, its just a function of the insanity brought on by baseball playoffs week. The first night the shrimp was a feature with the pasta on the side, the second it was the feature. It was an easy out but usually under better time circumstances we do better than that.
Thanks for the additional detail!
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