So Much Cooking

24 April 2014

So I feel like for the past few months I've been cooking nonstop.

Part of this is my fault. I'm very much a from-scratch person when it comes to cooking. I'm pretty much always looking for ways to go further down the unprocessed food chain.

Did you say I can MAKE my own coconut milk? Will it take LOTS of extra time and will my results be marginally worse than canned coconut milk but that will only cause me to try again and again and again? When can we start??

Today I was looking at a recipe that called for buttermilk and I thought "Well, I don't have enough time to buy my favorite cream from Costco and culture it and then churn it before tomorrow, so I guess this one's not happening." I know. I even annoy myself. In order for me to drive to my neighborhood grocery store to buy buttermilk I will have to give myself a pep talk. With a lip-pursing, steering-wheel gripping kind of pep talk, I can usually do it. 

Can't relate? Well, we all have our crosses, right?

Ugh. So yes. I spend a lot of time cooking, and that's a whole lot my fault. 



But we've also had a lot of people eating over here lately. My little brother's been living with us and he probably eats enough for two and a half adults, so I have to up my game on the regular. I have another bachelor brother in Houston who comes over semi-regularly, and it seems like every week we have some friend or relative driving through town and stopping in for a meal, and I feel like I'm just doing SO much cooking. And it's hard. It takes so much thinking and planning. And I want to be good at it. And it's hard. 


We hope to have a whole bramble of children. They will probably want to eat everyday. I'd love for our house to be a house of big meals and big laughter. But, geesh, if I don't feel like I'm already living in a loop of me clutzing about my kitchen chopping onions, wielding giant pans and pots, dishing out food, nursing a baby, unloading a dishwasher, processing some laundry, and then, hey, we're chopping onions again! 



And sometimes I have to lower my simple food nazi standards and buy a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store, sometimes I don't have the time to let my chopped onions rest long enough to develop their cancer-fighting allinase enzymes. I'm learning to make it through those moments.

I'm learning a lot actually.

Some little lessons like "When in doubt, triple the recipe."

"Unless it's from the Pioneer Woman."

I'm learning to talk myself out of stressful situations. Like when the husband is still not home, and we're barreling into toddler meltdownville, and I'm figuring out how to stretch the entree because I just found out that so-and-so is coming to dinner, and I'm begging Jake to run get a toy for the six month old in the Bumbo since my very modulated version of Little Bunny Foo Foo is no longer cutting it, all I have to do is get a little perspective, a little eye of the storm. I have to remind myself that this is just all I ever wanted. 


I have to remind myself that it won't do to stress out over preparing big dinners because big dinners are among my most favorite things.

I have to remind myself how happy all this feeding of big mouths and quieting of little ones makes me.

Because I'm so happy. Life has never been fuller or more demanding. Sleep has never been so precious or so unpredictable. My blog posts have never sung so many verses of the same song, but it's just the truth. I'm so blessed. And I'm so exhausted. And I'm so blessed.



Now I'm off to make another resolution to meal plan. 


22 comments :

  1. Okay if I wasn't already grinning at this point:We hope to have a whole bramble of children. They will probably want to eat everyday. then I was laughing by that little onesie Lucy June is sporting by the end. And although I'm not as far down the food unprocessed chain as you (baby steps here) I definitely understand. I enjoy cooking. I enjoy making it tasty and healthy. But it does seem never ending. Yesterday I just let Sebastian cry and cry and cry in his high chair because the dinner prep that needed to be done and the disaster zone that was our kitchen had to be dealt with and so ... my soundtrack was wailing.

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  2. I totally hear you!!!
    My mom told me (two weeks post partum today) : get your feet on the ground then you will be ready to cook from scratch again, but I'm like...how else do you cook?!?!
    Glad to have found your blog (via Bonnie at a knotted life to Blythe at fike life to here)! Browsing as I nurse the baby and the toddler lays on my lap with a stomach bug.

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  3. Last night, I literally planned to have pancakes for dinner. Not just something I threw together at the last minute because the afternoon was crazy. And the only way I've ever "made" buttermilk is the old add lemon juice or vinegar to regular milk trick.

    So, you're doing way better than me, that's all I'm saying!

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  4. Bramble of children!!! Oh my gosh, I have never found a more fitting term for what we hope to have too!

    All grocery runs include pep talks to me, the children, the grocery cart, the non-organic avocado because they didn't have organic, the poor old man who tried to talk to my stage five clinger of a 14 month old... Pep talks are where it's at!

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  5. Oh yes. I feel the same way. Three times a day. I love to cook. But I can get so stressed about preparing meals. I don't go nearly as far as you in terms of making everything from scratch, but I do try my best to do the unprocessed thang and it gets hard! BTW, I love your aprons :)

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  6. I love to cook and I feel like I am in the kitchen all the time! I make most of our own baked goods/breads except sandwich bread, I haven't mastered that yet, it is difficult with being gluten free. I make our own granola and started making our own yogurt now. I have tried to keep to a schedule for when I do the bulk of our cooking/baking but I can't imagine how I will keep this up when we have children! You go girl!

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  7. This is so TRUE. I find myself begrudgingly kitchening so often and I need to remind myself more that- duh, this is exactly what I want to be/should be doing. The onion thing is slightly conflicting for me, though- I recently read that because onions "draw out", leaving them on the counter or reserving excess onion for leftovers is like, super hazerdous, because the onion has sucked up all the bacteria floating around your house. What say you?? Also, Lucy's steak onesie.

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  8. Are you throwing bread baking into the mix?!! I find I go through seasons of being excited about cooking and then not. And I really do love to cook. But sometimes, we get SO busy with all the kids, etc., that it just becomes a chore. With my kids being a bit older, they all have a "favorite" meal or food item, and when we're super busy, I try and simplify by rotating through a few recipes that are easy and that I know everyone will eat. They don't care and don't get bored, because it's stuff they love, and it gets me off the hook for a few weeks of meal planning until I feel like I can up my game again!

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  9. BUT LUCY JUNE'S ONESIE. I die.

    And oh my gosh you're all back to your tiny self again and look perfect.

    Also, I thought I was being super crunchy by putting vinegar in milk to formulate buttermilk but...I'm thinking it's not actually that amazing an endeavor now.

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  10. Haha, I LOVE this!! I know the feeling..in fact I basically lost it with the extremely needy and fighting kiddos as I was preparing lunch today. I hate when I do that.

    I know you must be an amazing cook, and your kids don't even know how good they have it yet :)

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  11. Though I've never tried making buttermilk (but now I want to!), I have so been there with the need for the MOST OPTIMAL INGREDIENTS prepared in the MOST OPTIMAL way (at, of course, the lowest possible price). And oh how it hurts to settle. Though, it should be said, we are doing a lot of settling these days.

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  12. You would be proud of me; I've been making some delicious biscotti to have in the mornings with my little homemade cappucini! Fig and dark chocolate!!! Dried blueberry and salty cashew!! Anyhow, I know it's amateur stuff compared to homemade coconut milk:) One day I'll get there.....on opposite day. Well, Lucy June is possibly the cutest little T-bone baby! She and Jakey will be/are fed soo well because you are a GOOD cook. Except for pesto from the garden. I wouldn't repeat that :)

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    1. Ha! I think of that pesto SO often. How young and careless and clueless we were.

      Now tell me more about your biscotti.

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    2. I think the effort on the pesto is laudable, right? I mean it seemed like it could be awesome... Do you make biscotti? I bet you would make some mean ones! I'll just scour the recipes on my foodgawker app until one looks appealing enough. I've been using normal flour, BUT I imagine you could try to substitute it with whole wheat or almond flour (though maybe the texture may be altered with almond flour). The fig and dark chocolate was a great combination, but I'd definitely like to try another combo. Any thoughts? Rosemary or lavender? Or is that too reminiscent of soaps for the morning?

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  13. I know this is lighthearted, but this made me flash on my sister and the craziness that this imposes on other people. Everything at a big meal needs to be homemade, even the rolls. After more than a few grueling meals (nothing getting done because it ALL needs to be maximized) with people coming over and her high, high expectations being met through the work of others and I won't go back. No more Thanksgivings with her. It really is crazy and crazy-making not to pick your battles. This is coming from a person who grew up with a single mother, three other siblings and food from our garden, home canned food and home made bread. My Mom is the queen of streamlining and choosing what is important. If it's all important, then none of it (other than the food) really is.

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    1. We rarely venture away from lighthearted around here ;)

      But your point is well taken. Whenever I'm hosting and I feel stressed out I have to remember how that translates to my guests because I can't really welcome them into my home if my demeanor isn't welcoming. Now that I've been doing more hosting, I often reflect back on growing up and thinking about how clueless I was about all the work my mother was doing prepping for holiday meals, etc. I kind of want my guests to have a similar experience: I don't want my labor to take center stage.

      When we have people over and I'm a little stressed about it, I find that it's really easy to be gracious to my guests and harder to be gracious to my husband...so that's what I've been working on personally.

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  14. This post really resonated with me. It's not so much that I have to make kefir and milk my own goats, but that I am a picky and fairly fancy eater myself and to get excited about cooking I have to make it into a project. So I plan to make a souffle and broccoli au gratin and a lemon tart and perfect chocolate chip cookies and all the things on one night. But I just had my second baby and am going back to work soon and am realizing that I need to accept that sometimes, cooking is about showing up and accepting that boring-but-marginally-healthy is what's best for the family at a given time. The same old pasta puttanesca recipe we made seven nights ago is going to have to work sometimes, and takeout pizza will have to do on others. If I get stressed out then it defeats the purpose of cooking, which is about nourishing your family, about hospitality, about sharing pleasure with those you love -- not impressing people with the food. Also, I've learned that it can be just as pleasing to my family to have a simple, no-frills Shabbat dinner with just a baked omelette and challah, especially if it means my husband doesn't come home to the oven on fire and me screaming for him to hold the baby, but instead finds a relaxed wife who is happy to spend family time together.
    I'm also struggling with how to offer hospitality to others. I get so worried about perfection that I usually wind up freaking out on my husband, and I don't think I present the graciousness and welcoming spirit that makes people feel at home. And because we host people so rarely, our house is always a mess, meaning that hosting people really is a huge and stressful project. But I really want to! It's a work in progress.

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