Mom is Just a Nickname

In our first year of marriage, Toph definitely had the edge over me when it came to cooking skills. In fact, I brought a reputation for horribly bad cooking with me to our relationship. Where he was creating luscious lasagna for me, I shrank from the thought of cooking for him. He definitely did NOT marry me for my abilities to feed him well!

There was a story in my family about pancakes I made one Sunday morning. My brother and his friend, who had spent the night, ate them along with my mom, sister and I. Both boys got horribly sick later that day and blamed my pancakes. (I’ve always believed that if my pancakes made them sick, it’s because they were really good and the guys ate too many of them! The rest of us were fine.) Neither of the boys would eat my cooking again for years!

There was the time I was determined to make a stir fry for Toph in a style similar to what my dad always used to make: ground beef, broccoli, soy sauce….it always seemed like he just tossed stuff into the pan and it came out great! So, I tried. That was a NASTY experiment. There is no other way to describe it, except for the name Toph and I have taken to calling it: Beth’s Soy Fry. It was so salty from too much soy sauce, it was inedible.

I also managed to burn water our first year together. I still get teased about that. Often I get incredulous looks that say, “HOW the HELL do you burn water?!” Well, folks, it’s called short attention span: Put on the pan of water to boil. Stare at it a few minutes. Get bored. Wander off to putz on the computer. Forget about water on the stove. Sniff the air a while later and wonder what could possibly be burning. Go looking for it. Find the pan on the stove, black on the bottom. Yep, I burned water. I can’t remember if the pan survived or not.

I distinctly remember trying to cook a venison roast in my crockpot one time. That was nasty.

Still, I did manage to produce some winners in that first year. I could make a beef stew that had people begging for third and fourth servings. I often took a crockpot of that into Toph’s office with a loaf of fresh bread and fed the entire office (which consisted of three or four people at the time).

By the time I was pregnant with Sullivan in our third year of marriage, I like to think I was gaining a better reputation for my cooking. We moved back in with Toph’s parents then, and (after I got over the horrible first trimester) I was often found in the kitchen cooking (yes, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen!). I discovered meals like chicken and barley bake, meat and black bean burritos, fajitas, and crockpot cheesy chicken. I began to enjoy cooking a lot more than I ever had before.

Early on, I made it a habit to try a new recipe each week. I don’t make it to each week all the time, but I do it often enough that the reportoire of meals we eat is always changing slightly. Some of the things we’ve tried have been hits. Some have been decidedly ‘two thumbs down.’ Those nasty experiments are a good excuse to order a pizza though!

Now, as Toph and I enter our tenth year together (our wedding anniversary is in March!) the balance has swung more in my direction. I can’t claim to be a better cook than Toph, but I’d say we’re at least even. We certainly have to order less pizza nowadays due to failed cooking experiments than we used to!

moar funny pictures

We try to sit down every week or two to make a menu. A list of meals we plan to make in the specified time period and when we plan to make them. We always plan a couple of extra meals which are quick and easy to make in case some of the others fall through.

I write my menu on my my daily planner. I clip my grocery list to the page I’m using right then (the planner is arranged by weeks). Then I take it all with me when I grocery shop. That works well when I shop alone, but not so well when X is with me. Last week, I had my planner, coupons, grocery list and a calculator. They fell so many times, my list got all bent up, and my calculator was broken by the end of the trip. Luckily, my planner remained intact! I may have to rethink my strategy for grocery shopping with X along!

There are several benefits to menu planning. One is that it keeps us out of the grocery store for unplanned shopping. Another is that it helps me know what needs to be done ahead of time to serve dinner at a decent hour. And the biggest way it helps our family, in the budget sense of things, is it keeps us from eating out too much. It’s expensive to eat out!

Here’s what our menu looks like this past week from 1/20-1/26.

1/20- frozen pizza (obviously cooked!)
1/21- crockpot chili with mashed potatoes
1/22- baked lentils
1/23- chicken cordon bleu/broccoli and cheese
1/24- ribs
1/25- split pea soup
1/26- spaghetti and meatballs
1/27- stuffed cabbage rolls

Here’s what we have actually eaten so far this week:

1/20- frozen pizza
1/21- crockpot chili with mashed potatoes
1/22- kids and I had mac and cheese, Toph had black bean and ham soup leftovers
1/23- chicken cordon bleu/broccoli and cheese
1/24- baked lentils
1/25- ribs and mashed potatoes

Tuesday, Toph came home late from work, so we altered the meal plans accordingly. This was an unusual week because three out of six of those meals were new to us. I normally try to keep it to one new recipe every week or two. We are in the process of eating things in our freezer which are older, though, so the ribs and the chicken were put on the menu. We’ve been putting off making those for various reasons. The lentils was a vegetarian dish I’ve been wanting to try.

Although I tend to plan only the main dish, we always have side dishes on the table. I keep staples such as potatoes (baking and flaked), rice, and pasta on hand as well as supplies for making bread. Then I keep the freezer stocked with frozen veggies like peas, corn, green beans and mixed veggie packages. We always have salad and baby carrots on the table at dinner time. Right now, we also have celery available.

I used my crockpot twice this week: for chili and ribs. I consider a good week if at least one of my meals can be made in the crockpot! It takes pressure off at dinner time, which tends to be a crazy time in the house.

I’ve done the shopping without a list, I’ve done the cooking without a menu…it takes time to get used to doing it this way, but it really does save me time in the long run. It saves me the decision at 5pm…what do I cook? Do I suggest we go out? If we go out, where do we eat?

I get stressed out with too many choices, just like a toddler given too many options for lunch! Eventually, I’ll just choose the path of least resistance…which is usually eating out wherever the kids want to go. That, to me, is not a way to live well!

I’m participating in a Blog Chain from Absolute Write. It’s my job as part of the chain to build on what the previous blogger wrote, just as she pulled from the blogger’s post before hers. The blogger before me is Polenth and I pulled this from her chain post to work from:

The problem comes in predicting what will be liked and what won’t be. It is difficult to judge the value other people will place in your writing.

This is has been something I’ve been trying to figure out lately, both for my blog and for the NaNo-Novel I’m trying to revise right now. I read other mom’s blogs and see their quick wit and dry humor. I’d love to be like them, in many ways, and sometimes I write with some harsh barbs without meaning to. I am learning that my natural style is far more formal than most of those blogger-moms, I think. If I try to be less formal, I think sometimes it falls flat. It’s hard to tell what others will enjoy reading and what nugget of information they will take from what I write.

In my fiction writing, I find that my style affects what genres and what voices I can successfully carry off. I’m still learning how to give my characters the depth they need, how to give them their own voices, without my writing falling flat.

My favorite authors have a way of writing which draws me in. It’s almost like they brew up a pot of tea, lay out some cookies and invite me into their worlds. I would very much like to have such a way of writing. I’d also like to develop their skills in creating characters. I have fallen in love with some of the characters authors like Anne McCaffrey and Jude Devereaux have created. They were perfect in that imperfect way of real people, even when they weren’t actually human.

I think as much as any particular style or voice or audience I want to target, I want to write things that make me happy. I want to read something I’ve written and fall in love with my own characters. I want them to come to life for me, even as I write their stories. Slowly, this is happening. Sometimes, I’m cooking dinner and one of my characters starts talking with me. Or two of my characters start a conversation where I can eavesdrop. I drop everything and run to write down whatever snippet I can remember! (Maybe my family is starting to think I’m crazy for suddenly running off in the middle of dinner to scribble something down? Hrm, well, no, I’m pretty sure they think I’m crazy already for other reasons!)

I think if I can find the stories and styles that I fall in love with, someone else will enjoy what I write. I’m pretty sure it won’t be everyone…you can’t please everyone all of the time, after all. If I do it right, it’ll be an editor or two I’ve finally gotten the courage up to submit to (maybe it’ll take me 200 tries?)

Next on the chain is MRasey at Twisted Fantasies.

If you’d like to follow the chain from start to finish, here are all of the participants:

living my life all over again
Spontaneous Derivation
Jenn Hollowell: Working Writer
Peregrinas
Techtainment
Anything That Pays
Polenth’s Quill
wfg thinks out loud
Twisted Fantasy
Spittin’ (out words) Like a Llama
A Thoughtful Life
The Speakeasy
Virtual Wordsmith
The Writer’s Round-About
My Copious Notes Blog
Tennessee Text Wrestling
Writings

awchain

There are so many foods out there that are delicious and fantastic and waiting to be eaten! L is one of those letters that holds a couple of our family’s favorites. Funnily enough, they are ‘Toph Specialties”–he’s the one that cooks them, almost always, in our house!

Lasagna. Ah, the memories associated with Lasagna. It was the first meal Toph ever cooked for me. Ok, the first meal either of us ever cooked for the other, even!

Toph and I met on the internet, originally. Six months or so after we started talking regularly, we decided we wanted to meet up in real life (irl). So, the weekend after his birthday, he drove from Northwestern Ohio to the Eastern panhandle of West Virginia to see me. He’d made this lasagna at home, frozen it and then hauled it across Ohio, Pennsylvania, some of Maryland and a tiny bit of West Virginia to get it to me. He drove after working eight hours…it was close to an eight hour drive. I still cannot believe he did that. I worried about him the entire way.

Anyhow, the lasagna took forever to cook in the little oven in my dorm’s lounge/kitchenette. Other residents kept coming in to sniff at it, to ooh and aah over the homecooked smell. I think we even shared some of it with a friend or two. Who ever said that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach should have reversed it! I thought it was incredibly sweet of Toph to make that lasagna for me. I’m sure the fact that he went to all that trouble to feed me helped convince me that it was true love.

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My parents actually introduced the next one to us. I guess it came out of a garlic lover’s cookbook and was originally made with shrimp. They altered it to go with chicken since we don’t eat seafood. They also used white wine to make it. Toph uses Triple Sec (a citrus liquor) when he makes it. It’s melt in your mouth, sweet and savory with a tang of lemon. One friend described it as ‘Sex on a Plate’ because she liked it so much! We generally just call it Lemon Garlic Chicken, though. After all, it’s one of J’s favorite meals! It’s perfect served with pasta, salad and some garlic bread.

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So, no recipes today either, for a very specific reason. I was reading more about copyrights and I don’t want to infinge on the copyrights of the authors of any more recipes. I haven’t decided yet if I will remove the recipes I already have up, but I’m leaning towards it. I’m not averse to sharing recipes, but I don’t want to post them on here.

It makes me sad because I’ve been enjoying sharing favorite recipes with this alphabet game. Now you just get my memories!