Over winter break, we rented a sweet little ski cabin. On top of the ski pants and snow boats and snow coats and groceries, I stacked my slow cooker. This was completely against my best-practice packing instincts, but I had a feeling it would make my after-slope life much easier. Truly, I had no idea.
That first snowy evening, I put on a pot to boil water for pasta, the light went on, the water started to steam, I heaped a salad into a bowl, and ten minutes later, the coils were ice cold.
A few weeks ago, I made a very large pot of red sauce, the kind of red sauce that you can ladle over spaghetti, or spoon lovingly over baked ziti, or lace in between layers of noodles for lasagna. I did many of the things you can do with red sauce, and I still had some left over. It came to the point where one more dish of pasta just wasn’t going to cut it, not even with my pasta-loving offspring, and it just seemed too little and too late to freeze the remainder. I had pizza dough, though, and it was a cold, damp night. Something tiny inside me whispered calzone, and I had a vision of a brick oven, and golden mound of dough stuffed with melted cheese and savory red sauce, and a leafy green salad, a fire, a glass of wine, and I got to work.
Two days ago, my fifth grader left for school declaring, “Time to face global climate change!” It’s been 85, 90 degrees here. In October. By 4 pm, our house, with it’s western facing wall of windows, is a hot box. We’re steamed out of the kitchen. I’m certainly not cooking, and we’re certainly not eating in there. Also, there have been the debates. And baseball. Which = a lot of TV dinners.More
Some mornings, you’re turned upside-down by 4 hours of sleep. There’s a sink full of dirty dishes, and you ruin a batch of pancakes. There’s the problem of the lumpy pony-tail, which you can’t make it right because you’re drunk with fatigue. There’s an 8AM appointment for the broken clothes washer. Predictably the necessary part will arrive in 10 days.More
with apologies to the non-breeders, and the breeders who’ve already run this particular gauntlet…
Because I know the world doesn’t really need another school lunch post…
But: if we’re going to talk learning to eat, I can’t avoid the fact that I have to re-learn the school lunch thing every. single. year.
Because every single year the situation changes. In the beginning there were bentos, with baby vegetables, and dipping sauces, and Japanese stickers. Then there were bentos with sandwiches in cute shapes, and hard boiled eggs molded like kittens or fish, and rice pressed into hearts and stars. And notes. I kid you not. But back then, in the beginning, there was only one meal to pack every morning, and only one child to feed before 7:30 am, and actually, back then I wasn’t the one making breakfast, which was a very nice situation. But that situation changed.
Then there were two, and one of them was older, and she only wanted to eat what her friends were eating. There were a lot of things that were Not Allowed in The Lunch. There were a lot of sandwiches for a long time. Routine, repetition, predictability, comfort–these were paramount. In lots of ways, they still are.
Then there was the year my book was published, which included a lot of joy but also relentless fatigue. This year happened to coincide with a whole lot of growing and eating. Both kids seemed bottomless pits of insatiable hunger. Thankfully, this year also coincided with a new school lunch program, and slowly, those after school blood sugar crashes subsided. Mostly.
But this year is different. I’m taking a sabbatical from teaching, which means I can’t quite bring myself to shell out $4.50 meal x 2 every day for that hot lunch. I did, however, shell out the money for two good thermoses. And they have changed my life. For one thing, they work. Unlike the old ones we had, in which mac & cheese congealed into a clotted mess of cold pasta by lunch, these actually keep things hot. They also keep things cold. It’s not rocket science, I know. Now the options seem manifold: think anything with rice, anything canned, frozen, stewed. The frozen food aisle at Trader Joes is my new favorite place. Also, I’m finding it easier to prep these things in the morning. Fewer steps. Less mess. No crumbs.
A short list of Things They Will Now Eat For Lunch:
Making lunch is not really my favorite part of the morning. But it’s not too terrible, either.
Mac & cheese, apples, wasabi peas, mini chocolate chip cookies