Cooking for Two

Yum?

One of the odd things about my job is the conversations I am privy to as I visit each table with their flight of wines. Sometimes I hear funny things that make me laugh. Other times I hear something which resonates with me.  The other day there were three or four gentlemen tasting wine together and as I stepped up to pour for them, one said to the other, "Ever since the kids have gone off to college, she says she's not motivated to cook anymore. She heats up frozen meals in the evenings." 

Of course he said this with a sad, resigned air, which I kind of get, but on the other hand, if it's bothering you, dude, step up and grab the apron. Man can cook, after all.

But I do have a lot of sympathy for the wife in question. It's taken me a long time to get out of the habit for buying enough food to feed an army on its feet, which is what our family was for the longest time. It's almost a grieving process you go through, once there is no longer a full family to cook for. You spend years learning recipes that will keep kids full and will re-heat well, since kids are so busy you're often feeding in shifts. It's all about big casseroles and other one-dish meal wonders.

When they leave home, all that changes. Immediately.

So one of my greatest challenges has been re-learning how to cook -- for two adults, not five people of various sizes ranging in age from 10 - 40. Harder still was learning to BUY for two and not five. 

Ifyou're single, I would imagine it's even harder to get up the motivation to cook for yourself than it is for couples, when you could just graze out of the fridge instead. Not that there's anything wrong with grazing. But it still should probably not replace meals 100 percent of the time.

But I also saw a study recently that many older adults who live alone are eating more and more processed food (both frozen and take-out), because they don't want to cook for one, and that is creating health challenges in the form of high blood pressure from high sodium levels, and diabetes from high sugar levels.

So what's to be done about the home cooking conundrum for singles and couples?

I think we need a revolution in small-portion cooking. I think there ought to be cooking TV shows that feature small dishes and limited portions, cookbooks and online resources that offer the same. With the Boomer and even Gen X'ers aging out, this becomes even more important. 

You can add a homesteading angle to it as well. How do you grow for just one or two people? How much do you preserve, freeze and put by? Having just gone through this with a whole bunch of canned tomatoes I put up in 2013 and need to use NOW, I really could have used some tips on knowing how much to grow when my kids left home. In 2013 (the year after they left) I grew waaaaay too much, bought waaaaay too many groceries, and didn't eat enough of any of it. 

And  I have the expired food in the bottom of my trash can to prove it. That shouldn't be the learning process. 

It's all well and good to be able to feed the small army that a houseful of kids is, but if you're an army of two or even one, it's no less important. It's something I plan on spending some time exploring in life and here as well, in the hopes of finding a new way of cooking, growing and eating.

Because there's more to growing old than throwing a "Lean Cuisine" meal in the oven (or even an Amy's Organic Kitchen meal) and calling it healthy eating. 

It's not. But I'm convinced that there is a better way out there, and that it can not only be delicious, but also be easy and save money in the long rung. Not to mention stop you from filling your trash can or composter with expired foods.

Snap peas and generation gaps

I walked into the staff meeting at the winery last night with a large bag of snap peas, and immediately became the most popular lady in the room. Three of the girls I work with and a couple of the guys came right up and started taking handfuls of peas out of the bag as if it was a cookie jar, oohing and aahing as they bit into the crunchy pods.  After the feeding frenzy I noticed one of my friends tucking what was left in the bag into her purse to take home and eat later.

 I find it heartening that so many 20-somethings are fans of healthy food.  In fact, I love taking excess produce to the winery for that exact reason.

My grandparents' generation ate healthy food which they grew themselves.  The ones who were not land-owning farmers turned parts of their city gardens into growing spaces, whenever possible. My parents' generation, on the other hand, entered adulthood at the exact time large supermarkets came into being, complete with frozen food on Aisle 5, where you could pick up a boxed TV dinner, bring it home, and heat up individual and unique meals for everyone in your family in minutes. 

It was a convenience that took hold, and the result is that many of us born in the 1960's grew up eating that way.

This was, I should add, a purely American phenomenon back then.  When I visited London in the late 1960's as a child, I was amazed when we went shopping with my grandmother.  We visited the butcher, the baker, and the fishmonger.  Paper goods we bought at a local general store. Milk, cream and butter was delivered to the front door every morning. Nowadays of course London has the same giant supermarkets we do, but back then they lagged a good 20 years behind the states.  And they were probably healthier for it.

Anyway, post-war London was the environment my mother grew up in, and so I can somewhat understand her wonderment and willingness to plunge into American Supermarket Life when she moved here and married my American father. We ate hot dogs, fish sticks, TV Dinners and Stouffer's Lasagna on a regular basis.  Our next door neighbors did the same and, in another nod to convenience, ate nothing that was not served on a paper plate, thereby eliminating dishwashing.

And so my generation grew up expecting that kind of convenience, and you'd expect that most of us would simply have passed that onto our own children when we came of age.  And most of us did ... for awhile.  Sometime after the Good Times With No Social Responsibility ended (also known as the 1980's), food became important again.  Trend forecaster Faith Popcorn called it "Nesting."  Staying home more, learning the art of cooking again, and even keeping an herb garden or small veggie patch in your suburban backyard.

"Nesting" took hold with the financial uncertainties of the 1990s, along with a swing back towards natural ingredients. My generation discovered a lot of the food we'd grown up with in the 1960's was, to speak frankly, crap. Kool-Aid contained Red Dye #3, which caused cancer.  Saccharine, which was supposed to deliver us from the weight-gain of eating real sugar, also was found to cause a variety of health issues. In short, my generation realized that if they continued on the path that our naive but well-meaning parents had put is on, we'd be dead or at least in chemotherapy by age 50.

But if we started the "natural foods" trend, the next generation ran with it and made it the norm.  No longer was eating at McDonalds seen as a healthy dinner option.  No longer would Diet Coke and a can of Pringles be an acceptable lunch. If my generation went back to the land for our food ( while sometimes wistfully remembering the soft, spongy texture of Wonder Bread or the extreme sugary sweetness of a Cherry Coke), my kids' generation turned their back on all that tasty but deadly garbage completely and made endamame, quinoa, pomegranates and locally raised-and-butchered animals the new cool food. And kudos to them for it.

The new "supermarket" in town.

As I sat on the counter of the winery watching this new generation of 20-somethings and young parents fighting over a bunch of fresh snap peas from the garden, I realized that Mother Nature always has a reset button -- a generational one.  My generation pushed it, the next one furthered it along, and now we just have to make sure the new generation -- the toddlers growing up now -- understand the reasons why their grandparents and parents turned their backs on food that wasn't real, and opted for a crisp snap pea over the stale snap of a processed supermarket cookie.

I hope they understand why. I really do.