First Day of Food Organization

Day 1. I cannot tell you what a relief it is to know what you are making for dinner, and to have all the ingredients. (This usually only happens to me on Thanksgiving, and even then I always forget cranberries.) It is like knowing you have an outfit in your closet that fits, goes together, and is a good color for you (shit maybe I should be working on my closet.)

We chose Beef with Mushrooms and Snow Peas for the first dish because my middle daughter is out of town, and she is allergic to soy and shuns red meat. However by the end of the day, all my kids suddenly have playdates. Coincidence?

Considering it’s a stir-fry, this dish is shockingly easy to prepare – because the peapods don’t need to be chopped, and the mushrooms chop easily, and my husband happens to be home in time to slice the beef. It’s very yummy but a bit too fragrant – I think it needs less ginger and five spice powder. But it’s a keeper, and I think my kids would all eat it because it tastes a lot like the stuff we get in those little white containers with the wire handles. I don’t usually cook Chinese dishes because It’s too much chopping and too many ingredients and it makes my head hurt even before the msg kicks in. But this recipe has proven me wrong. And there is only one pan to clean, so I won't feel like a professional dishwasher in addition to a chef.

Planning Meals When You're Not A Cafeteria Worker

In case you are wondering who the asshole is that rips out magazine pages in your doctors’ office: it’s me. (shoulda used that pig butt photo here I guess.) I’m always gathering recipes, because a) I’m always hungry and b) I’m easily influenced. So I have a lovely little notebook filled with sleeves containing recipes from magazines. And -- I have an electronic grocery list with columns for every aisle of the local store that I forced my husband to create. (I know, slightly anal. Again, pig butt.) But what I’ve never done is sat down and planned to cook more than one recipe at a time during a given week – then plugged it into the list -- because that’s too hard. That's like owning a restaurant or something.

However, while playing around on Epicurious.com I saw that they have a grocery list feature that aggregates groups of foods from multiple recipes, creating a single list. Voila! I decide to choose recipes from this site as an experiment. My goal for the perfect week: two fish recipes, one beef, one chicken, one vegetarian, one salad (and one of these recipes has to be in a crockpot for a busy day.) Okay, that’s only six, but I need a day off.

I chose Beef with Mushrooms & Pea Pods, Salmon with Rice & Broccolini, Smoked Trout in Lettuce Cups, Chicken Provencal Stew, Mushroom Ragout, and Arugula Salad with Goat Cheese and Walnuts. All of them look simple, some are vegetarian, and none of them are too spicy or odd or expensive. But my youngest daughter will probably hate them all. Tough. Someday she'll be a mother/restaurant owner and she'll know why we sometimes serve what we serve for dinner. "It's Make-Your-Own-Sandwich Night! Yippee!"

As they say in Australia, I'm stuffed when it comes to cooking

Unfortunately for my poor family, I often approach cooking the same way I approach writing my novels. I’m drawn to dangerous situations with interesting damaged characters. This has led to an unhealthy attachment to the dark side: peppers, chiles, curries. My middle daughter has been known to flee the table sobbing that her teeth were on fire.

When I manage to tame this instinct toward spice, I always seem to go in the opposite direction: comfort foods that are cooked in one pot. The kids don’t dig this either: they moan when they see the crockpot. “Can’t we eat normal food?” the youngest one cries. “Can’t we just get a bucket of chicken and eat out of it with our hands like other kids?”

Add to that the fact that we all have food allergies, my husband and I both work, the kids all play multiple sports, and he does the grocery shopping, but I do the cooking – and it’s a recipe for disaster. (That should have been the name of the blog but it was taken.)

Recently, I have vowed to get our dinner situation under control through better planning, smarter purchasing, and more variety. I’ll share recipes, links, online tools and photos along the way. But mostly I’ll have a record for my kids of the fact that I tried. I really did.