Three posts about food in one week? This blog really needs re-branding to reflect my All Food All the Time subject matter.
To be fair, today’s subject is more about marriage/homemaking/problem solving/I’m not sure what than about food. But it’s still food-adjacent. Food. No wonder my pants are all too tight.
You know that I have been a little… listless lately, about meal planning and cooking. If you make food for your own family on a regular basis, I am guessing that you know the feeling. It’s so relentless and so wearying… and, maybe worst of all, it’s so thankless.
I suppose I can understand, with an eyeroll and a sigh, why Carla scrunches up her face and says “ew” to some things. The child Ews a piece of chicken, so it’s not super shocking when she Ews roasted salmon or butternut squash soup, right? And it’s all part of the plan, teaching her to try new things, teaching her to be polite, teaching her basic table manners like not Ewing the food that someone lovingly or at least begrudgingly prepared.
And I can totally understand that not every meal I make is going to be a winner. We can’t have tacos and pizza all the time. Some things are going to be less exciting. And, yes, there are going to be some attempts that fall flat. Flavors that don’t work together or measuring mistakes or a miscalculation on how long to cook something, resulting in dry meat. It happens.
But Internet, these misses are becoming the rule rather than the exception. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I try something I’ve made a million times before, or something brand new, I keep flubbing them. The shrimp scampi with zucchini noodles, which is one of my favorites? I made it last week and it was AWFUL. Like, I could barely force myself to eat half of what was on my plate awful. I blame the parmesan – even though it was a brand new container and even though I sniffed it and it smelled fine and there was no visible mold, it seemed off.
And then I made my tried-and-true butternut squash soup recipe… And the soup was super thin, and my husband said it didn’t really taste like anything.
And then I made salmon with roasted veggies last night… and even though I checked the salmon’s temperature every five minutes, I managed to overcook it. Plus, my husband’s piece had pin bones in it. He found three or four before he gave up on eating his salmon. (I grew up eating salmon all the time, and my memory is that finding little bones in your salmon fillet just happens. It’s not a huge deal. To me. But my husband HATES it.) (Of courseit had to be my husband’s piece; my piece had no bones in it.) And Carla claimed that she HATES salmon, and wouldn’t eat more than a single bite.
And this is just in the past week, you guys! This kind of repeated meal failure is happening more and more often.
Have I lost my touch?
My husband is usually very supportive of my cooking. He says, every night, “Thank you so much for making dinner.” Sometimes, the dishes are things he doesn’t love – anything with shrimp in it, he could do without – but he eats the meals anyway because he knows it’s not easy to be in charge of meal planning and because he appreciates the work that went into it. And he says he doesn’t have to eat his absolute favorite meal every night.
But, man, lately, everything I make seems to have something to criticize.
I don’t want to make food he doesn’t like! (That’s different from making food he doesn’t love.) If there’s a problem with some recipe, I want to know so I can fix it!
But I also can’t keep plodding through the meal planning and preparing process if it’s met with criticism every night. It makes me want to cry.
The other thing is that… I’ve been having a lot of Down Days lately. It started when my friend got sick, back in August. But then really ramped up when she died. And there have been some other stressful unbloggable things, too – nothing serious, but things that have me feeling anxious and sad and stressed a lot of the time. When life is going great, it’s much easier to brush off some failures in the kitchen, you know? When life is not as good, those same failures feel magnified. Like… I can’t even succeed at something so simple as making dinner. It’s adding to the Down Feeling, is what I’m saying.
I am SO OVER IT. So very over it. All the pleasure has been sucked out of something that I take pride in, something that – sometimes – I really enjoy doing. I want to just throw up my hands and quit.
And yet, my family needs to eat. Every night. This is a problem I MUST solve.
The alternatives, as I see it, are as follows:
- My husband shuts his trap and eats what I serve and pretends to like it even if it’s gross.This option makes me sad. I don’t want him to dislike eating. I don’t want him to feel like he has to lie to me. When he does have a criticism of the food I make, he is always super careful and gentle; he’s not screwing up his face and Ewing things (take notes, Carla). Plus, silly as it may be, I WANT him to think of me as a good cook. I definitely don’t want him to think of me as a BAD cook, or even a mediocre one. I am good at so few things in life, I really want to be good at this. Okay. This is not a viable option.
- My husband takes over the meal planning and preparation.This is unlikely to happen. He’s just too busy at work. We’d never eat until ten pm. This option probably needs to come off the table.
- We buy prepared food and/or go out to restaurants every night.This sounds less healthful than eating homemade meals, and expensive, not to mention time-consuming, so I’m going to say this is off the table as well.
- We stick to known quantities. Spaghetti. Stir fry. Crockpot barbeque pork. Chili. Variations on protein-with-veggie. (Although, thinking about the mediocre butternut squash soup and the shrimp scampi disaster, I don’t even know if that’s safe! What if I’ve just lost my ability to cook???) I’ve written beforeabout how I would LOVE to simplify… or to emulate Nicole, and make each day of the week its own type of food (tacos, stir fries, pizzas, etc.). The main problem with this is boredom. First, my family gets tired of eating the same thing. We tried doing Taco Tuesday for a while, and it didn’t take long for my family to be SO SICK of tacos that we’ve had them maybe once or twice since? (My earliest reference to implementing a weekly Taco Tuesday was early August, and my family was sick of it by September 3.) Second, I get tired of making the same thing. I LIKE to try new things, I LIKE to experiment. This is probably the best option, though.
- Letting everyone fend for themselves.I am very tempted by this option, I have to tell you. My husband can make himself some Bolognese or turkey chili on a weekend, and then eat that every night. And I can make my own food. (Carla, of course, will have the same rotation of foods she will eat/tolerate that she always does.)
- Probably the real answer is some combination of the above. I wonder if I can make my husband responsible for one meal a week, at least on weeks when he isn’t on call. Maybe a weekend meal. And we already usually go out to eat one night a week. Maybe we make it A Thing. And maybe on our after-school activity nights, we do something prepared from the grocery store. And then the other three nights, we can do old standbys. That sounds possibly doable. We’ll see how it goes in practice.
Are there ideas I’m missing? Have you ever had a cooking slump like this before? And, if yes, how did you climb out of it? Do you and your spouse divide cooking duty, and, if so, how?
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