The other day while driving home, I was listening to a rebroadcast of Terry Gross' 2009 interview of Ruth Reichl on Fresh Air from nearly two years ago. This one of the few radio programs I still try to catch as often as I can, in this case in a car, pulled to the side of the road in a nearby neighborhood, with sleeping boys in the back. Listening to the exchange of these two women toward the end of the interview was one of those magical moments that really clicked for me, as I had been having a really frustrating week, feeling a bit exhausted and unable to keep up with my daily routines; certainly everything was getting the better of me, and I was feeling a tad overwhelmed by the chaos one can easily feel with two small children, when it just seems impossible to get anything done. I had even announced to Nalin that I was going to start charting out a weekly plan for meals and activities; something I had rebuffed so easily in the past. And just that next day, here was Ruth Reichl, former editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine talking about how when she left the New York Times to work for Gourmet, she did so in order to be able to come home and make food for her family every night, rather than eat out at restaurants or get take out. This, she explained, was something she should have done a long time ago and that "family dinner" was so important. Of course, Terry Gross asks the question that was on my lips at that very moment: How would you come home and make food every night with the demanding job of editing the premiere food magazine in the country? And here is what she said in a nutshell (I'll put quotation marks around this section, but since I don't have it memorized, it is essentially a paraphrase): "Here's the thing about cooking: the big misapprehension is that cooking is time consuming. It is the preparation that is time consuming: the shopping and planning. If it is four o'clock and you are still trying to figure out what to have for dinner, then you have already lost the battle." I think that in the realm of parenthood, truer words were never spoken. She then goes on to explain how she would make a plan every Sunday night for the week. Every meal would be planned out and the shopping would be done. She stuck to her plan, and easy, yet satisfying meals would delight her family each night and provide a background for the day's events to be showcased through conversation and companionship.
Now I have heard of people doing this for years. And I have been encouraged to do this or have thought of doing this myself, but something always seemed to keep me from it. I've written before about often feeling a bit too driven by spontaneity to adhere to what I may perceive as rigid dictates in many areas of my life. This, unfortunately, extends to the way I organize my office (or don't organize), to the way I pack for trips (thus inevitably overpacking), to the way I plan my kids' activities throughout the day. You name it. For some reason, though, Nalin and I have really tried to make home-cooked meals at night a priority for our family for the last couple of years. Both of us come from homes where this was a ritual — stay-at-home mom and full-time working mom homes alike. What has kicked me in the butt, so to speak, is that my love of surprise and invention has turned into more of a dread. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing more exciting that seeing what you can whip up in the spur of the moment, but that joy gets dampened a bit when you are trying to juggle too many things at once. That's when take-out Thai food comes in to the picture... like, all the time. It's just so much easier. Not only that, we would find ourselves running out to the market on a daily basis to buy things for whatever struck our fancy on a given day. We'd end up sometimes spending even more money and time to cook, since we weren't optimizing what we already had on hand. So who says it's about necessity; I think that planning is really the mother of invention.
So I finally did it. I started making lists of everything we got at the farmers markets and what meat we had in the freezer to keep on hand; then, based on those lists, I started devising meals for the week that would utilize what we had and shop once for what we didn't. For many of you, that may seem like a no-brainer, to shop only once a week, but if I can get us to do that, it will be some sort of miracle. I am more than half-way through my first week at this plan, and already I'm feeling a bit more relieved. And I haven't had to go shopping since Sunday (it is Wednesday), with no plans to do so until the weekend. And what I am finding is that the creativity I thought I'd miss with this new ritual is evident more in the planning, leaving me free to create and move more freely during the week. Now the challenge of keeping up with this.
One line of Ruth Reichl's really struck me that afternoon, and I hope to keep it as a bit of an anthem going forward. In discussing how her family life changed so dramatically when she started making the time to cook each night and focus on family meals, she said simply, "It's when we all sort of really entered each other's lives in a really profound way." And isn't that what it's all about.