bread and circuses/roses

[mamajoan]

In online working-parent communities a common theme in the "how do you manage?" thread is the idea of advance meal planning and prep. You plan ahead for the coming week what you'll have for lunch and/or dinner each day, and then on the weekend you grocery-shop accordingly and do a bunch of prep, up to and including cooking a bunch of stuff that you can then divide into portions and put in the fridge/freezer so you can just grab it and go.

Of course this sounds like a great idea, but it's something I've never been organized/together enough to actually do, even when I didn't have kids. I always wanted to be, but never was. Just not my personality. Still, parenthood is nothing if not an exercise in rethinking/altering your personality, and now that I'm working, it seems like a REALLY good idea to do at least some of this stuff in advance.

So yesterday I cooked up two different things that were to make at least seven meals for me. It was a lot more stressful than I had expected and now I'm questioning whether it's worth it. I felt like I had to basically neglect the kids for all of Sunday just to make these two dishes -- and they were NOT complicated dishes either, but between all the prep and all the dish-washing before and during and after, plus numerous repeated pauses to handle pressing kid needs (Ruthie has learned how to open drawers, and correspondingly how to close drawers on her fingers), it took up most of the day. And then I stressed out because I needed to put all the food into containers and find room for it in the fridge, which was sort of a hidden extra time-cost, and it was late and I desperately needed to bathe the kids, etc., etc., blah blah. So it was stressful and I felt like I sacrificed being a good mama for the day, just to make some food. Sigh.

Possibly this would be easier if/when I've had more practice with it. Or possibly not. I don't know. The food is good, but was it worth it? I already get so precious little time with the kids, is it "right" to have "wasted" so much of that time on cooking? Granted I could have tried harder to get Isaac involved in the cooking, but there wasn't all that much he could have participated in, and when he doesn't like the foods involved, he's less interested. (Which brings me to the question of how to meal-plan for the two of us, but that's another post.)

Ehh, so I'm angsting about this. And therefore I shall haiku:

The body is fed
soul starves atop pile of rice
kids need their mama.

Comments

[mogwar.livejournal.com]

Oh, it is a big pain in the ass to cook like that sometimes. Which is why we never could keep it up. Instead, we spread it out a lot - we plan to make one major big meal on the weekend, like lasagna. And then we just double that recipe. A whole pan of lasagna is already more than one meal for the three of us, but by making two pans of lasagna (which is more work than one pan, but nowhere near double) we get a whole bunch of extra meals.

Sure, there is also more work storing it, but that gets easier with practice, and our giant chest freezer really comes in handy. And yeah, that first week, having a pan and a half of lasagna in the freezer wasn't that useful, but after a few months we ended up with a decent variety squirreled away in the freezer, and it completely saved us on meal planning.

Yeah, it might even be easier to make out meal plans for the week and never stray for them, but that's just not our personality. So, instead, we have four kinds of homemade soup, three or four casseroles, a bunch of sauces, and stuff like that in the freezer most of the time.

I can make a decent meal any night just by heating what's in the freezer, maybe boiling a few noodles, and throwing a veggie in the microwave. And I don't have to pick what we're having more than about five minutes before I start heating it all up.

[pekmez.livejournal.com]

I don't cook like that either - sometimes we do a big project meal on a weekend and make plenty to have leftovers of, but generally I wind up cooking a meal every 2 or 3 days that has some leftovers, and we also sometimes order takeout that has some leftovers. I try to involve and occupy Kata with the cooking to some extent, too, even though she is small.
Even just narrating what I'm doing and giving her something to pretend to do with a spoon and a bowl feels like not ignoring her.

but it does get faster to cook in general with practice, whether you're trying to do a lot in one day or spreading it out throughout the week.

There is definitely myth that it "no" extra effort to cook 3x more food, though it is often helpful vs cooking 1x that amount of food on 3 separate occasions - there is totally more chopping and cleaning and preparing invovled until it all goes into the bigger casserole dish or whatever.

[sandykidd.livejournal.com]

It definitely gets easier with practice.

It's also part of why I love my burritos so much. I can put anything (I mean ANYTHING) in them, so there's always variety, they don't take up a lot of space in the freezer, so I can make enough to feed Bart and I lunch and dinner for a week (not this week, though - there're too many frozen pizzas in there right now).

It's definitely something I hate to do, too. My grandmother practically beat the habit into me and I fought it until I finally gave up recently and just started doing it because it makes the rest of the week so much easier.

I put Baz in his high chair for the first half of prep and make faces and sing and feed him and all that (half hour, tops). Then we go play for a while. Then I can either wait to finish wrapping and freezing the burritos until after a nap, or I can put him back in his high chair and do my bit in super fast motion while he's throwing cheerios everywhere for the cats to eat.

As for meal planning for the whole family...The only advice I have is the plan I have for when Baz is big enough to eat big people foods, and I don't think you'll like it well enough to use it. *shrug* Baz is going to eat whatever's for dinner. As long as there's healthy variety (yeah, I need to get better at that), I won't feel I'm doing him a disservice by keeping things simple at the table.

[retch.livejournal.com]

I prep my food ahead of time when I can. Generally that's just grill 3.5lbs of london broil and slice a couple days worth of sandwiches at a time. :) Works fairly well, but the prep and cooking is super easy, and there is zero thought in slicing it since it is the same pattern for every day's worth

Putting on my pro-organizer hat:

[findyourfloor.livejournal.com]

It sounds to me like you were trying to use a kitchen that was not ready to be used. A ready-for-cooking kitchen has clean dishes, babyproofed cabinets (in your case), and an organized/clean fridge. It's like trying to drive a car on a road trip when it needs repair or maintenance.

I bet some time could also be shaved off the cooking depending on which recipes and ingredients you choose, but I really think the most important thing is keeping your kitchen ready to be used, which means making and keeping a commitment to daily maintenance, like a half-hour to an hour a day. One of the organizing books I've been reading talks about viewing organizing as a process of "getting to ready" - that is, not just doing it for its own sake, but to make it possible to do what you want in the space.

I hope that's helpful!

Re: Putting on my pro-organizer hat:

[mamajoan.livejournal.com]

Yes, the unkemptness of the kitchen is definitely a factor. (I won't really say disorganized because I happen to think my kitchen *is* fairly organized, at least relative to much of the rest of my home!)

Right now it stymies me just from how far behind I am, as you and I have discussed before. In fact, before I did all that cooking, I had actually cleared off some counter space and washed a big pile of dishes that had been sitting around for literally months. I felt all proud of that, and then I went and undid it all by undertaking these huge cooking projects, creating another big pile of dirty dishes (i.e. above and beyond what happens from regular daily use). And that's how I get discouraged and fall into inertia.