Please don’t ask what’s for dinner. I’ve run out of meal ideas. Week after week, my grocery shopping list looks the same, covering the basics—like dairy, veggies, and fruit—but few meals or even ingredients are actually planned. After a $200 food shop, the refrigerator still looks empty. Where I once considered and conceived recipes and ingredients, my mind now draws a blank. I’m not sure I care.
Consider me retired from the family meal planning.
For decades, if I’m counting, I have internalized responsibility for my kids’ meals, preparing mostly healthy dishes. Vegetarian since age 15, I overcame my reluctance to cook meat and poultry and mastered nightly dishes for them that I would never eat.
I’d search out new recipes, trying to provide some variety and more vegetables, often necessitating an extra trip to the store. More often than not, new dishes were successful; those that were not liked were not repeated. All this without even being able to taste the food. After all, these meals were for the kids, not me.
My boys learned to cook at least some basics before college. At a minimum, eggs, pasta, and stir fry were well within their repertoires. They could feed themselves. Yet, when any of them returned from college or moved back home, I still felt the need to feed them. Or at least have food available.
But something has shifted in the last nine months, perhaps since my middle son moved out for what is likely permanent. With the youngest at college, I now have pockets of time without a child at home, and thinking about his meals isn’t part of my day.
However, as anyone with kids in college learns, there are many school breaks. In other words, college students are home a lot. Mine is now here for 5.5 weeks between semesters. That’s a lot of meals he expects to eat. And I am not interested in cooking them, even though I feel responsible, at least a little bit. But I think he has noticed that something is amiss foodwise, as he recently commented that the quality of my cooking has gone downhill. Oops, oh well.
Funnily enough, I don’t think the cooking per se is vexing me. I have cooked and baked since high school, by choice, not necessity, even hosting dinner parties as a teen. Trying or creating new recipes was a fun challenge, as was mastering my grandmother’s complicated desserts. My recipe file (okay, it’s a semi-organized binder stuffed with paper recipes) includes a cheesecake recipe from the mother of one of my closest high school friends and one for a cheese and spinach pie from the mother of my high school boyfriend. One of my hallmark dishes is a secret recipe I refuse to share. Even in my cooking slump, I still find myself baking cookies or making a new pasta dish.
So, it’s fair to say that cooking is part of who I am. Or who I was.
One of the interesting things I have discovered from interviewing successful women is that many do not cook. Whether Millennial, Gen X, or Boomer, somehow, these women never felt that cooking was something they needed to do. And it’s that need to do it – that responsibility – that I no longer want.
That doesn’t mean I won’t cook. Just the other day, when I had some free time, I considered baking chocolate espresso cookies (I didn’t) and preparing a healthy chicken stir-fried meal (I did).
