Weekend Update: Cooking, Ahoy!

I'm not sure how, when or where the imparting of food knowledge is traditionally supposed to transpire between a mother and daughter.  In our family, having the oldest child move into an apartment was a nice trigger event for everyone and why not Aisle 7 at Fred Meyers for the location?

I decided a long time ago I wasn't particularly concerned that our daughters weren't that interested in cooking. I did all I could to avoid it as a kid and started sharing cooking duties with my husband out of necessity. I figured if I could learn in my 20's, so could they.

We definitely did our fair share of cooking together as a family; cookies, scrambled eggs, pancakes, burritos, salads, etc. (The youngest daughter actually cooks quite a bit and makes killer grilled cheese and crepes.) Mostly these were basic staples that you could live on for months but without much excitement or variation. It appeared E. wanted to get serious about veggies, meat and crock pots so off to the store we went.

Watching her get serious about cooking made me reflect back on what is it about this part of domestic life that is so interesting and often freighted in some way.  For women, it can be a loaded topic if you are married or sharing domestic life with someone. Is this a shared responsibility or something that just comes along with being a woman? What do you do if neither of you like to cook? Shop? Do dishes? Especially for a daily chore that takes so much time, expectations abound but hard to define.

I also grew up reading all of the books in the Little House on the Prairie series.  I read the parts about their Thanksgiving and harvest dinners over and over and over.  It seemed like Gilligan's Island to me, with the impossible exoticness of how they made food and where the ingredients came from. How could they have made bread, cakes and cookies without electric stoves? Did they really use a butter churn to make butter? What could possibly replace a fridge? And who makes egg-nog mid-summer with their own eggs and winter ice kept cold in the barn?

In addition to pressure from the 19^th century Ingalls and Wilder families, I also grew up in a family with amazing cooks who made everything from scratch: my mom, grandmothers, aunts and later my mother-in-law. Our holiday dinners contained a quality and variety of dishes I realize now was a reflection of their collective talent.

Regardless of my historical or existential baggage, the bottom-line is there has always been something about cooking that forces me to slow down more than I prefer and takes way, way too many steps for an outcome that can be gone in minutes.  Case in point:

How to Make a Meal! Analyze what food you have in your kitchen, make lists, go to the store, buy food, take it home and put it all away. (If you garden, do about 100 other mysterious soil and seed-related tasks.) A few days later, take some of that food back out again (or go to your amazing garden where things never turn brown or die), organize it, start making it, set the table, and finally, eat. About ten minutes later, clear the table, compost the scraps, put leftovers away, and have a small argument about who does dishes. Repeat in four hours.

Most of my friends that find cooking relaxing enjoy some of the steps besides the eating part.  They love looking through cook books and they like grocery shopping. Many of them also just like the process of cooking; they find it relaxing, with or without wine to sip along the way. Gardening literally makes some people I know radiate with excitement, especially going through seed catalogs in February.

I would say over the years, the positive experiences I associate with food and cooking has warmed my heart to this daily chore.  I experience food-love on occasion in grocery stores, still try new recipes and exotic imports. I've found my own style, what I like to cook and eat, and stopped comparing myself. The biggest draw of it all for me is I love eating good food and I like doing it around a table with friends and family. Cooking for a family, while full of challenges, is a wonderfully gratifying experience. There is nothing quite like that and often, those moments make it all worthwhile.

Truth be told, however, what would help the most with my attitude toward cooking was if I cooked about once a week. If I cooked only once a week, I could get very, very excited about cooking.

So back to the task at hand: Here we are with only a moderately prepared 21-year old about to move into an apartment. As a result of having a child now out on her own, I decided it was time for some brief tips. Since they were going to be brief tips, it didn't make much sense to waste time writing them down before we left for the store. Aisle 7 seemed quite appropriate:

• Buy healthy, simple ingredients and until you get your own stocked kitchen, supplement spices with packets and sauces
• Get a crock pot and throw stuff in
• Canned soup and grilled cheese
• Always have eggs around
• Cook meat in volume then freeze in Ziplocs for later
• Chocolate
• Buy organic when possible

That's it! That's all I could think of. We were so thrilled with all we accomplished. The two of us zipped around with younger sister K who was dorm-room shopping, bumping into other families who appeared to be doing the same thing with their college-age children. In fact, it would have been interesting to stop a few families and get a sampling of all the cooking tips and suggestions that were being thrown out as kids moved into apartments for the first time. 

In the end, it was a choppy, slightly inelegant way to transfer a bit of experience to a younger child. That is how much of our family has been however so it seemed comfortable and familiar. I know E ended up with several dinners and a decent supply of breakfast and lunch food. I took an interesting trip down memory lane and was happy to eat dinner out on the way back home.  Hurray for cooking, for the fun times and work that goes into it too.