Cooking Family Meals - Is It a Hobby or a Mundane Daily Task?

byroxydog1312

1.4K followers

4 years ago

I did the math. In my lifetime, I will have cooked somewhere around 60K meals. This accounts my life to be from 18 to 80 years old, and I took out roughly 8K for the times I ate out or when others have cooked for me, just as a guess. Even if I cooked every meal for 1 year, the total would be around 1100 meals. So yea, that's a lot of cooking if you think about it. I'm going to tell you about cooking family meals. It's a daily task AND a hobby for me, so it's kind of interesting mix of fun and drudgery. Hopefully you will see that my methods take at least some of the drudgery out of it.

How My Cooking Experience Began

When I first got married, my husband and I were over at another couple's house. They had gotten married a week before us, so they were newlyweds too. The husbands were going to work on a car, and we ladies were going to put together a meal. We had steaks to put on the grill, but we needed a side dish. Potato salad! How hard could it be? I had helped my mom make potato salad a couple dozen times, so I thought we could do it.

My friend and I attempted the salad. It took way longer than the steaks. There was no Google or internet of any kind at the time. My friend had one cookbook she got as a wedding present, and there was no potato salad recipe in it. And there was NO WAY either of us were going to call our moms! We guessed at the ingredients but didn't have everything we needed, so we had to do a store run. We started cooking well before dinner time, but the potatoes would NEVER get done. Then we realized we needed to boil the eggs. We burned the steaks. My friend's kitchen lay in ruins. It was a total failure.

I am still friends with my cooking partner. We have been friends now for 33 years. We laugh about that meal often, because now both of us can make a potato salad in our sleep. We do it without a recipe, and if we don't have all the proper ingredients, we make do with what we have. Both of us could go into our kitchens right now and come up with a tasty potato salad without cracking a book or going to the store, or even Googling it! That potato salad confidence comes from a couple thousand potato salads made through the last 33 years.

As a Mom of Two

I very shortly became a mother of two daughters in quick succession. I had one kid that would eat just about anything, and I had one kid that would eat NOTHING. Their dad was a picky eater as well. So, early on I had to get creative making meals that would please everyone. I found that casseroles were the way to go. The picky eaters would shovel casserole down by the bucket full if I let them, and the kiddo that ate everything was satisfied too. I could sneak in ingredients that half the family wouldn't eat on their own, and no one would be the wiser.

The Queen of the Casserole Recipe

I have always been a fan of cookbooks and putting recipes together and trying new things. I was never one to experiment on my own, because the times I did never went very well (potato salad anyone?) So casserole recipes became my thing. I purchased casserole cookbooks, and tried new recipes all the time.

I found that I really love cooking. I love the grocery buying, the prep, the actual cooking, and of course the eating.

Thirty three years later, and I'm still a chef of all things casserole, even though I have a different husband, and my kids have moved away. I have learned a lot of new favorites. I've tried some that only needed one try, then we moved on to the next. Others we've made have become new staples in my repertoire.

One of my favorite things to do, is take an idea from a recipe and try it in different formats. For example, one of my husband's favorites is Corn Dog Casserole. It's basically chili, with cut up hot dogs and shredded cheddar, and a Jiffy corn bread batter over the top, baked for 30 minutes. We all like this one, so I thought I would try the Jiffy corn bread batter on other things such as Ham and Beans, Beans and Weiners, Sausage and Peppers, Beef Stew, etc. All were hits! I think next I will try my sausage gravy with the corn bread crust, and I'll keep you posted if it's good.

How Do I Enjoy My Hobby and Still Put a Meal on the Table Every Night?

I have learned that meal prep is the key here. That's breakfasts, lunches and dinners (and desserts)! Here are the Pro's to prepping ahead:

• Loving to cook is ... doing it for 3 hours on a Saturday. Drudgery is trying to put a meal on the table quickly after a long day at work, Every. Single. Day. By doing my cooking all at once, I am not rushed or stressed, and can take my time enjoying it.
• During the hot summer, there's nothing nicer than coming home to a meal that I didn't have to heat up the kitchen to make. When I cook on the weekends, I do it in the early morning, so I am not running my oven in the afternoon heat. I only heat up the kitchen once per week.
• I love to cook, but I hate cleaning up. If I cook ahead, I only have to do the major dish washing and wipe down once per week.
• Cooking in bulk speeds up the process. Let's say you need chopped onions for 3 of your dishes that week. You chop all the onions at once, and divvy them up for each casserole. You only have to prep once per week. That's one knife and one cutting board that need cleaned up once per week too, so cleaning is sped up as well.
• We get a variety of home cooked meals that we can reheat in the microwave. We don't have to eat the same thing over and over. We also get a variety of ingredients. If I didn't meal prep, I would likely (and have, I'm ashamed to say) eat a microwaved cheese tortilla every day for breakfast. Bad for me, and ever so boring! Prepping forces variety. It stops us from just grabbing the easy thing, because all of it is easy when it's all prepped.
  

  
  
  
• We can take our time and enjoy our food, instead of rushing to make it and eat it and clean up after it before we have to go to bed.
• Cooking meals at home saves us a ton of money. We rarely eat out at restaurants, mainly because we couldn't afford it. Ingredients are cheaper than prepared foods as well.
• No fast foods full of fat and preservatives. But our food is fast because it's ready just minutes after we get home.
• I know what goes into a meal. I know my kitchen, my pots and pans, my dishes, and my hands are clean. I know my vegetables are washed. I know where my vegetables came from. Again, no hidden fat, sugar, weird chemicals, or salmonella or e.coli lying in wait.
• Sneaking in the vegetables. When I cook, I can put an extra bell pepper or a package of frozen broccoli in a casserole. I can put pureed pumpkin in mac & cheese or soup. I can slip applesauce or yogurt into my baked goods instead of fat and sugar. That way we get all the good things for us, but still have our favorite "unhealthy" dishes.

Lists

Those of you who read my articles know that I'm a list maker. Lists help me cook too. Here's my array of cooking lists:

Dinners: This includes all our favorites, interspersed with recipes form dinners that I want to try. I just pick the next weeks worth of dinners off the top of the list, and put them on the bottom of the list once we eat them. I add more as I peruse Pinterest and see recipes to try. If we try a recipe and we hate it, it gets banished from the list.

Easy Dinners: While I'm working full time during the summer, I need easier stuff to make, so I'm not spending ALL of my weekends cooking. These easy favorites are recipes I have in my head that I don't have to look up, and often include stuff like steaks or hamburgers on the grill, or dump recipes. I am inventing stuff like this all the time: Like meatball marinara sandwiches, from frozen home made meatballs warmed up in home made spaghetti sauce, served on a hoagie bun with mozzarella, or my "famous" dump chili that is basically ground beef or turkey, then every can in the pantry, mostly beans or corn or green chilies, anything chili worthy. Made also with cooked chicken! I have dozens of these meals on a list and am always adding more.

Salads: I include two dinners a week that feature salad. They are usually restaurant type salads with a lot of interesting ingredients. This week's salad included a BBQ chicken number I had at Wendy's once that I'm copycatting, and a pasta Cole slaw recipe from Pinterest, that I will serve with oven roasted pork shops. On this list, I have main dish type salads that are a meal unto themselves, or side type salads to serve with our main dish.

Desserts: We love our desserts, perhaps little too much. So I keep a running list of dessert ideas that are good for us. This includes smoothies and yogurt shakes, baked whole grain cookies and granola bars, fresh fruit sorbets, and favorites like banana Nutella sandwiches made with raisin bread. I make a mean coffee cake that uses stevia instead of sugar, and I vary it with different kinds of fruit: think peach cobbler or strawberry short cake. Sometimes it's just fresh fruit, or just yogurt. We love to get a melon, and during my meal prep, I peal and slice it, then have it couple times that week. Again I take ideas from the top, and put them on the bottom once we eat them, which keeps up the variety.

Also, click here on my Lists article to see how I get my groceries!

In Conclusion

Oh, I could go on and on with my cooking ideas. I love to cook, and we love to eat. Cooking doubles as a necessity and a hobby, and I love every aspect of it. So, I do everything I can to limit the drudge and amplify the fun parts.

Now it's your turn.What do you do that makes cooking easier for you? What are your helpful hints? What do you wish you could do better? Please add your ideas, questions, and comments below, and thank you so much for reading!