Reading and Eating (A Rant)
I’m in the middle of Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants and I love it!!! During my travel last week I read half the book, AND listened to TEN episodes of a podcast called The Rest is History. Four episodes on the murder of Franz Ferdinand, and then six episodes on The Road to the Great War. Between the book and the podcast, I was fully immersed in life in Europe before and during WWI. Since I’ve been back, I can’t seem to find large chunks of time to read, and it’s frustrating. I just want to sit down for a long afternoon and finish this book! Sigh… the first week of school is hard. Eating Okay, here’s the thing. I’ve come to the realization that I hate cooking dinner so much that I don’t want to do it anymore. Why do I hate it so much? GLAD YOU ASKED. It’s too much work to plan the meals, get all the ingredients, spend time cooking, and then spend more time cleaning up…. all for a meal that some of us don’t even like that much. It’s gone beyond “irksome”- it’s a colossal waste of time and energy. We just don’t all like the same thing. I want simpler meals, without white bread, pasta, or rice, with no sugar, and I don’t like plant-based “meats.” Over the summer, my son and husband took over some of the cooking, which was GREAT. But I didn’t feel like I could impose my demands on them, since they were the chefs, so I either made my own thing, or reluctantly ate a dinner that didn’t really agree with my “sensitive” digestive system. If I cooked, I either had to modify the meal to suit everyone else, or incur the wrath of the family (everyone is still trying to recover from the fried rice made with brown rice instead of white.) Even if I can manage to make something we’ll all eat, my daughter will- at best- declare that it’s “tolerable.” It’s incredibly unsatisfying. The new plan is this: on Sunday I’ll make a “regular” dinner (I already can’t even think what that will be, but I’ll figure it out one night a week.) I’ll also meal prep simple things like roasted vegetables, marinated tofu, rice, quinoa, some simple sauces, and I’ll have cans of beans and chickpeas on hand. Monday-Thursday, dinner will be bowls, made of anything people want from the prepped items. You don’t like quinoa? Fine, have white rice. Or pasta. You don’t like the tahini sauce? Take the peanut sauce instead. And if anyone wants something more elaborate, they can cook it and clean up after themselves. Friday will be takeout as always (thank God) and Saturday my husband can cook, or we can finish up anything left over from the week. If I can pull this off, it will save my sanity. I didn’t exactly get it started this week- again, the first week of school is so hard. But I’m making simple dinners, like Nora’s Easy Chickpea Curry (I doubled the recipe and we’ve already eaten it twice,) I have my eye on Nora’s Buddha Bowl and also the marinated tofu from her Poke Bowl. This weekend I’ll do the meal prep- again, nothing too complicated because I also don’t want to spend all day Sunday in the kitchen- and next week we’ll start our “easy bowl dinner” journey! Does anyone have any suggestions for EASY sauces that could go on a bowl? Who has read Fall of Giants?