Cooking for none

By Cindy
When I say that one of the many pleasures of raising a large family is cooking large meals I'm not being facetious - I loved it. I loved everything about it: finding new recipes, planning meals, grocery shopping and especially sitting down to enjoy big meals with my five children, my mother, and sometimes extra friends and relatives.

I loved it so much that I came to believe that in a past life (which I don't really believe in) I might have been a cook at a lumberjack camp. I not only like to cook, I like to cook HUGE amounts of filling food, especially involving pasta and cheese. You'd think maybe I came from Minnesota, home of the hot dish, but I was raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., home of no particular cuisine. 

So then maybe you'd think that behavior like this had to have been learned in my birth family growing up, but nothing could be further from the truth. My father only ate certain foods (which had something to do with growing up very poor in the South during the Depression, but I never learned the details), and my mother heartily disliked cooking. My younger brother and I pretty much hated everything and ate as little as possible. (Once I threw up in the kitchen after swallowing lima beans whole. They still haunt me.)

Although my mother relied heavily on canned and frozen foods which were still sort of a novelty in the Fifties, she did have her specialities like ham croquettes (speaking of being haunted). I can still feel them in my mouth as they refused to go down: dry, faintly pink and of no origin you could have determined if you didn't know we had ham steak the night before.

By the way, I'm not disrespecting my mother's memory. She was a smart, funny, generous and loving woman with many talents other than cooking, such as playing, teaching, and writing music (violin and piano). She could sew anything and did, including new upholstery for a 1958 Mercury Comet (she removed the seats herself), and a suit for my father. But as she acknowledged, cooking was just not her thing.

So maybe my birth family was responsible for my love of home cooking. Maybe I watched too many sitcoms like Leave it to Beaver and wanted my own family to sit down to meals like that someday. I don't know.

But now that I'm retired it's all behind me, except for holidays and birthdays, and it makes me sad in the same way that my children being grown up and on their own still lays me low. I've never understood how people can say, "Phew! They're finally gone!" or, "Just cooking for myself now - what a relief!"  Seriously? Don't you miss them like crazy??

It's not that I didn't have a full life while I was raising my children, I did. I always had a full time professional career as a corporate writer, and continued it for many years after my kids were grown. I was never a housewife, though that was a job I had aspired to. I just loved the energy, love, noise and sometimes chaos of a houseful of people to whom I could show my love every night with a nice meal.

And our family celebrations, big and small, have always revolved around food and lots of it - usually way too much of it but that never stops us. It's more challenging now that four of my five grown children are vegetarians, but since one is also a chef I get lots of help for holiday and birthday meals, which are even more celebratory since they bring far-flung family members back together. 

Everyday cooking for myself is just not fun or satisfying. I've finally learned to spend less and leave the grocery store with fewer bags, but it's been a struggle. And I'm always trying to lose weight, so the fewer and less-calorie-dense ingredients in a meal, the better.

I know that I might satisfy my ongoing need to cook for a crowd by volunteering at a charitable organization that offers free meals, and I should. Maybe I will someday but I'm not ready yet. Right now I'm busy trying to recruit my two nearby grandchildren, ages eight and five, to the joys of thinking about, planning, making and eating meals. 

So far it's not going great.  "I don't eat that," says the five-year-old whose favorite meal at my house is squeeze cheese and crackers; "No, thank you," says the alarmed eight-year-old in such a polite voice as he looks suspiciously at a plate of something unfamiliar. My biggest flop to date was making homemade cheese snack crackers and chocolate sandwich cookies. I was beside myself with excitement, but it turns out I was alone in that emotion.

Maybe that's the way my poor mother felt with the ham croquettes.

Do you have any strategies for making meals-for-one fun? If you do, write them down below. I need help.