Trying to leave the dinner rut behind
The refrigerator doors are wide open. The shelves are half empty (or half full, depending upon your point-of-view). And there you stand, waiting for dinner to miraculously appear before you eyes.
I cannot count the number of times I have opened the kitchen cabinets or the freezer door, hoping that a fully-planned dinner is just sitting there, waiting for the taking. Cooking dinner is one of the most loathed household duties, simply because it doesn't go away. Every day, night after night, dinner is expected to be placed on the table. Yet, I never get more organized, planning out a week's worth of meals so I'm not scraping together the same old dinner at the last minute.
I wish I was one of those organized people who plans out the month's meals in advance. If I can tell my kids everything we're having for dinner as they get out the utensils, it's a good night. I give myself a pat on the back if the thought of dinner is in my head by mid-afternoon. And starting something in the slow cooker that morning? I do a little jig around the kitchen and then call my friends to celebrate my accomplishment.
And I'm not alone.
Most families rely on the same 10 recipes per month. They may switch oatmeal for the crackers in the meatloaf or use hot sauce instead of mild salsa on their tacos, but it's the same meals which rotate across the dinner table week in and week out.
We cook the same 10 meals despite millions of recipes floating around the World Wide Web and cookbooks featuring every possible cooking style known to man.
After perusing the fridge, my husband and I have been known to take the one ingredient we have on hand and search the Internet for a compatible recipe.
While this might seem like a logical solution, more times than not, the recipe has been retrieved from a Web site with little thought to who the contributor may be and is usually more suitable for the cats and dogs -- who end up with the inedible results.
In fact, my family shouldn't have to use the Internet because we have so many cookbooks. But to us, they are more collector's items than for everyday use.
I'm not making this up, but we have three books devoted just to cooking chicken, two Thai cookbooks, one just for Thai sauces, one just for chili (with or without beans) and one just for peppers. This doesn't count all the books by local churches and youth groups as fund-raisers.
And in the end, we use just one of the several dozen cookbooks we own: The How to Cook Everything cookbook. With a title like that, we shouldn't be eating the same meal twice -- but we do.
My family has accustomed themselves to my successes and my failures in the kitchen.
Recently, I found a mix for soup in the pantry. I'm not sure how long we had been owners of this package but I'm pretty sure it predated at least two, if not three, of my children. I felt it was time to purge the package from the pantry, but didn't have the heart to just throw it in the trash -- even though I had likely overlooked this soup mix for years for good reason. I knew it wasn't going to be good. But I tried it anyway since I had the ingredients on hand and the pizza delivery wasn't going to stop at my house that night.
In the end, I used quite a few ingredients to accommodate this soup mix and even my husband, who can tolerate just about anything I make, admitted that the soup was bad.
And once again, the cats wouldn't finish their own serving.
To alleviate the mon-otony of cooking dinner and to help our your fellow cook, food mixes in a jar have become popular. (There's even cookbooks devoted to the jar-mix idea; just what we all need on our shelves.)
These food mixes in a jar are a neat gift idea and get people to try new recipes, but there are a few drawbacks such as when you lose the instructions. At this point, you just have to guess what goes with the noodles and beans or how many eggs and sticks of butter to add to the brown sugar and flour.
Since these jars are usually gifts, at what point can you just throw the content out? I can't give a specific date, since I can't throw anything out without at least trying to save it, as I did with a cookie-in-a-jar mix recently.
The first sign that it should have hit the trash was when I used a spatula, then a butter knife and finally a steak knife to dislodge the brown sugar, nearly severing my third finger from my hand. (Fortunately, all small children were in another room when this incident happened so they didn't hear my reaction.)
But I surged forward without recipe in hand and guessed how much wet ingredients were required. I over-estimated and was soon adding more and more flour.
Giving up finding a good consistency, the concoction went into the oven, once again guessing on the time and temperature. After checking the center for doneness half-a-dozen times, I gave up and figured the cookie bars would "dry out" during the cooling process.
In the end, the cookies continued to ooze all over the pan and had that old taste which comes from sitting in the cupboard for one too many years.
Even the cats didn't like this recipe.
-- Ronda Graff still relies upon the same recipes, but would like to try some more new, exciting recipes on her family. But first, she needs to get a dog -- to help with clean-up -- since her cats are starting to avoid the kitchen.