Kitchen Party - A Cooking, Baking Mom Blog Hosted by Cuisinart

A Room Of Her Own And Cheese

We had a lot of goofy hippy ideas about how much our children would love having a shared nursery room - ala A Pattern Language - oh, the security they would feel! The cheerful kinship! They would go to bed singing "Kumbaya" and arise singing "Good Morning Starshine."

Um, no?

The Baby and The Boy - outgoing cheerful extroverts both - LOVE sharing a room. LOVE. We could hear then chatting long after they're tucked in, telling each other stories and making plans for the next day. And then we could hear The Girl shrieking "SHUT UP! SHUT UP, BOTH OF YOU!"

Not all kids - it turns out - have the same personality. Who knew? The Girl has the same privacy-loving personality as her father, AND she also loves order, unlike her two cheerfully messy siblings. Sharing a room was making her unhappy, and unlike her siblings, her moods last for more than five minutes. So she obviously needed her own room, and I don't know how your house is, but we just don't have spare rooms laying around... hey, what about the playroom?

So we spent the weekend clearing out the playroom, repainting it, putting in new curtains and moving all of her stuff in. And after a CRAZY amount of work, the proud new owner of her very own bedroom was able to sleep in her own space last night.

To celebrate, we had cheese fondue for supper - to our children's delirious joy. They LOVE fondue. Back  in the 70s, no adult party was complete without a bunch of clog-wearing dirndl skirt-clad be-braided adults getting out the fondue set, and then of course there was the fondue-backlash and I'm not talking about when some hipster spilled melted swiss cheese all over his polyester bell bottoms.

I think enough time has passed to re-embrace the sheer fun of fondue, though - we make chocolate fondue FREQUENTLY during the winter, and our kids greeted the weekend's cheese fondue with an unnerving amount of excitement. Without having any 70s residue (I am so old) to colour (avocado green) their opinions, they can see clearly what a good time it is - and whenever we've served any kind of fondue at grown-up parties, it's been greeted rapturously. It's playful and tasty and inexpensive and a fun shared meal - and at our house, it was a lovely way to re-emphasize that we are still a family, even as old patterns end and new ones begin. 

The Comfort Of Not Knowing

"Add some capers to the slow cooker, honey," I said to The Boy yesterday morning, since he was feeling helpful. "Add a tablespoon of capers."
"Okay!" he said, cheerfully, and then dumped the whole jar in.

"It looked like a tablespoon to me," he said, mournfully. But supper was still very good. Very caper-y. (And look at my new slow cooker! It's GORGEOUS!)

The Boy took Friday off - he said he was sick although he really wasn't, the fink - and he spent part of the day writing poems, since that's the way we roll around here (maybe it's all the capers). Here is his first poetic effort:

Thanksgiving, O Thanksgiving

The turkeys are good

The mashed potatoes are good

Everything on the table is good.

It's Walt Whitman-esque, if Walt REALLY liked turkey dinners. He was talking mournfully about how there's weeks - weeks! - until the next holiday dinner, which will be Halloween, apparently. I generally do a silly theme dinner - hot dog mummies with baked potato slice ghosts and that sort of thing - which the kids eat quickly while waiting for their dad to come home and take them trick-or-treating, as well as a themed school lunch, but they've never mentioned liking it one way or another. Which seems ungrateful, doesn't it?

Ah, gratitude.

I remember exactly one grateful friend growing up, one person who was thankful for the effort that her parents were making - and her parents, in retrospect, weren't doing a very good job. (Porn out in then open! Bills that went unpaid so the parents could buy booze! And there's more, but it's just depressing.) But their kids were really grateful, and for what I'm not quite certain. Everyone else seemed to pretty much regard their parents as their due, and their parent's efforts by and large went unnoticed.

And this is how it should be, I think. Gratitude seems like a pretty adult emotion, this understanding that other people are doing more than they have to for you, the knowledge that you're being given something you haven't quite earned. And there's also something sort of creepily sullen in the parental expectation of gratitude, the idea that I'm only making the stupid mummy pizza not so that my children will be delighted when they open their lunchbox, but instead to drill into their heads that I am a Good Mother. Oh, and also to impress their teachers.

What I want my kids to feel, instead, is the comforting certainty of routine, the knowledge that bedtime will always be preceded by baths and stories, the knowledge that Saturday morning is library time, the knowledge that they will open their lunches on Halloween to a ghoulish surprise. Later on, when they're adults, maybe they'll realize that the comforting rhythm of their childhood came through their parents' efforts, but for now they can take their happy childhoods for granted, not knowing really that it will ever change.

We Have A Winner!

Congratulations, Holly Sisson! Cuisinart's gorgeous pressure cooker will soon be headed your way! That was fun - I'll have to do more giveaways.

I am so, so frazzled this morning. Frazzled and exhausted. We went to a family reunion this weekend - my paternal grandmother's relatives - and it was great, but now I feel like I spent the weekend running marathons every night instead of what really happened (eating a lot of buffet meals, meeting people and playing one frantic game of The Amazing Race.). Then we staggered home yesterday, completely worn. So we're sitting around the house, and I look at the clock and realize that it was 7 p.m. AND I HADN'T EVEN STARTED DINNER! Yikes!

Meals as rushed as last night's dinner ended up being, I'm here to tell you, are not very good.

I read TONS of comments from last weeks post about how people are really struggling to get healthy, high quality meals ready for their families on a daily basis. I remember when I first was a mother and dinnertime would roll around and I would get this sullen "I have to feed them AGAIN?" feeling - but that was before I discovered the Wonders of Meal Planning. Here's a little bit of my upcoming week, with some notes:

Tonight, we're having a roast chicken with lemon, mashed potatoes, some grilled vegetables and a spinach salad. I'm making a buttermilk cocoa cake for dessert, as well as a batch of frosted, gluten-free chocolate cupcakes (I'm going to freeze most of those to bring with us on a trip next weekend.). While I'm in the kitchen and the oven is on, I'm going to make a pan of granola.

The leftover chicken will become chicken salad sandwiches for my husband's lunch tomorrow. Tuesday's supper will use some medium-sized zucchini a friend gave us, which I'm going to stuff with a spaghetti sauce and ground beef (hamburger I bought on sale and froze. Whoo!) mixture and serve with a quick tomato and avocado salad. And then on Wednesday, I'm making an economical brown rice and spinach casserole for supper, which will DOUBTLESSLY result in endless complaining from everyone in my house. Wah wah, you freaking babies!

Okay. So that's a quick overview of our Gastronomical Week. Meal planning sounds kind of daunting when you first think about it - where will you find all that time to sit down and THINK of all this stuff? - but in reality, it's MUCH quicker than desperately trying to think of what to make at the end of each workday. I generally sit down on Friday evening for half an hour and sketch out our week, drawing up my grocery list at the same time. After the next morning's shopping, I am DONE thinking about what I have to make for the REST OF THE WEEK. Easy! 

How does your household handle meals during busy weeks? Are you struggling with meals, or does your family have a good handle on preparing healthy, tasty meals? Share your cooking strategies and advice here, as well as your favorite quick cooking books, magazines and websites, and I'll use it all in a big weekday cooking post next week.