Cooking at Home

Helping prepare dinner (using his play hammer to crush crackers)

Eating healthier and spending more time with my boys are two things I can't stop thinking about as I prepare to rejoin the real world and go back to work in 4 short weeks.

There's not a lot I can do to spend more time at home, but I have made one small step - in July I'll start seeing patients 20 minutes earlier in the morning and finish 20 minutes later in the afternoon (I did this once already last year, so this will put me leaving work 40 minutes earlier than I did a year ago, which translates into getting home 50 minutes earlier, as I'll miss the worst of rush hour traffic). Next year, when I quit pumping, I'm thinking about shortening my lunch time as well, so I can leave even earlier.
Getting home earlier will make it possible for us to eat dinner together as a family.  But I don't want to wait for July to be able to do that.  And when July gets here, I don't want to spend all my time in the kitchen every evening, and I really don't want to do carry out or prepackaged foods every night, either.

So I've started working on my cooking skills.  While Jennie has been here, we've cooked most nights, trying out new recipes and freezing quite a few meals, as well.  Not all of them are the healthiest, but they're good and made with fresh ingredients, so they've got to be healthier than what I've been doing in the past. Over the past few years, I've become convinced that portion sizes play a huge role in how healthy something is, and that a high fat main dish can be made much healthier by serving a smaller portion with a lot of fruits and veggies on the side. That's always the hardest for me - making sure I get my fruits and veggies.  In a typical day my son will eat more fruits and veggies than I eat in an entire week.  (And after reading this recent study that suggests a diet high in fruits and vegetables decreases your risk dying, I'm even more motivated to work on this!)

Finn absolutely adores cooking. He loves to help whenever he can, and then when we eat the finished product, he likes to say something like, "This is really tasty. Who made this? Mommy and I did!" He's such a great eater (most of the time) and already recognizes things like garlic and onions and freshly grated parmesan cheese, so I'd like to encourage his love of food and cooking by involving him in making meals as much as possible, too.  My mom is a great cook, but never liked having us in the kitchen, so my sister and I never really learned anything about cooking from her at all. I do understand why she never had us join her.  It is distracting, and sometimes frustrating, to have a toddler working in the kitchen with me, but seeing the joy he gets out of it makes it worth it for me. And I think he's more likely to try new foods if he was involved in cooking them.

We need to work on hand cleanliness while cooking

I don't really know what I'm doing in the kitchen most of the time, but I'm learning.  And I've decided that there are three different types of meals I'm looking to learn to cook: 1) fast and easy weeknight dinners, 2) crock pot meals to make during the week, and 3) more complicated recipes to make on the weekend that will give me at least a night's leftovers or make enough to freeze.

The only fast and easy meals I can think of now involve using already prepared ingredients (like make your own pizza with store bought pizza dough), but I figure if I do something like that just once a week, then I should be able to come up with some good choices for other nights of the week.  And I've found what may be a great recipe for shredded chicken that will allow me to freeze chicken for use in recipes during the week, cutting down the prep time significantly.

It's unlikely that this blog would ever become a cooking blog, but I'm thinking of sharing some of my recipe finds here, including how I involved my boys in the cooking.  And I'd really love if you'd share some of your go-to meals in the comments or on your own blogs, whichever category they might fall into (though quick weeknight meal ideas would be especially welcome!)