I was listening to the radio this morning and they were discussing a study done in the UK where families say they really only eat the same 6 dishes at home. I don't mean that a cut of meat or type of dish made up the list of the 6 dishes, but actually the exact same 6 recipes. Their reasons were things like fast and family likes it, don't want to look up new recipes, don't know how to cook anything else and always have the same ingredients on hand.
I admit that I tend to have many of the same ingredients on hand all the time. But give me a pound of ground beef and I could make a dozen different things with it. Maybe it's because we buy our meat as a quarter of beef or a huge batch of mixed pieces of pork. I grew up like that, too. My mom had to get creative with some of that stuff. And in the summer since we get our veggies from the farm and don't pick what's in the basket at all, we have learned to try new veggies. And find yet another thing to do with zucchini.
I am really blessed that my kids like a lot of different foods, too. And they don't always expect their food to look the same. If they know there is stuff on the table they like, they are happy. And my big boys are the kind that think their mom is THE best cook ever.
I must say that we do have some old standby's here, though. We do have eggs about once a week. They are fast and cheap. And I don't have to do any preplanning. I serve waffles or muffins with them and whatever fruit is in season. And for a while we were having homemade pizza every Friday night. But now it's a little complicated with Trey's guitar lesson when I need to be shaping pizza dough. I think there is some comfort in having the old standby's. I know that meatloaf will always be a winner. And my tangy porkchops in the crock pot is a great way to deal with bone in random cuts of pork. But I can't imagine having them all the time.
2 comments:
I think our journals make us much more aware of what we're eating, doesn't it? Our diet is a mixture of things which we eat almost every day like our breakfast oatmeal or yogurt and fresh fruit with a topping of dry cereal, and our evening meals where there is a lot of variety. Like you, I learned to be creative with basic ingredients at my mother's knee so even oft-repeated entrees like chili and meatloaf are seldom made the same way twice.
Around our house, meals are sometimes a challenge. There's one vegetarian, one flexitarian (me), and one very picky teenage daughter who will eat meat depending on how it's cooked. We usually do pizza on Fridays--sometimes homemade, sometimes not--but my daughter is tired of it, not to mention that hers is never homemade. (Admittedly, I get tired of it sometimes, too.) We try to follow a fixed schedule of sorts: pizza on Friday, burgers on Thursday (yes, vegetarian burgers, too), etc, but it seems when we do that, people get tired of the same old, same old all of the time. Sometimes meal planning stresses me so much, I decide I'm just not going to cook that particular night.
Post a Comment