This is a big deal. I cooked quite a bit as a bachelor, but having someone to cook for encourages me to pay more attention to incorporating variety. (I used to cook up a big batch of a dish and eat it for a few days straight.)
It's even better when you stop being a single parent and then somebody cooks for you.
My sister used to make her kids recite "Thank you for making us a delicious meal." before they could be excused and clear their plates and wrestle. Then she figured that it wasn't fair to make them say 'delicious' if they didn't like it. Now they have to say something like "I appreciate the time you spent making us dinner." before they can be excused to clear their plates and wrestle.
I have so many great, non-implemented ideas for things to make the kid recite.
It doesn't take very long to memorize "Villon" so maybe you could make her recite that after every meal.
Yes OP yes. Without another adult to feed I would be giving the kid sliced turkey and frozen peas, which is all she ever asks for, every night.
That's not "peas which are frozen for storage and heated before serving," but "peas which are eaten while frozen." There's some kind of ice craving at work.
"It puts the yogurt in its mouth or it gets the hose again."
Our kids love still-frozen peas, too. My mom used to give them to me when I was little, too. Also they're nice when it's hot out.
9.2: What about frozen beans, for variety?
No no no! In the possible world where I am a single parent, I am far too distraught ever to freeze anything but peas and peas alone. In the real world I mix it up more.
If you're a single parent, you can date strippers to cheer up.
Strippers are notoriously fussy eaters. Have you ever tried to convince a pole dancer to eat kale?
My croutons are dusted with cocaine.
I should think pole dancers eat lean protein bedded on entire potagers of kale.
In reality, dating a stripper largely involves serving her kids frozen peas.
I'm not one to argue with experience.
Serving them frozen peas from your bed of cocaine by the swimming pool, but still.
A friend of mine met his now-fiancée when they were both twentysomething undergrads and she was moonlighting as a stripper. She was an immigrant, needed money for school, hated stripping but somehow achieved the separation of self needed to make it work; I've always wondered how as she's about the most introverted person I know. Eventually she figured out, like the rest of us, that it's easier to make money with computers and now programs Java for the U.S. Army.
Let's all list our slanderous stereotypes about strippers who date single parents.
Eventually, they all end up descending into the pit of iniquity that is military Java programming?
If society does nothing to prevent it.
Back to the original post, doesn't the presence of another adult in the household make cooking more satisfying only if the other adult likes what you cook?
Is the other adult a stripper? Are there peas?
Yeah, I hate when you have to do "Here come the airplane, open up the hangar" with an adult.
Jammies is pretty easy-going about what I cook. There are some broad outlines about meals that were particularly hard to choke down, but in general he's good natured about my learning curve.
In other words, he wants his peas unfrozen.
Pretty much. And no big chunks of potatoes.
I love big chunks of potatoes. But not with peas, unless the peas are unfrozen and there are carrots.
My wife views potatoes as some sort of obscure ingredient that you need to have an exact recipe in order to cook.
#6: I used to make my kid say, "Thank you, kind and wonderful mama," whenever I did anything for her.
She quit falling for it when she was about eight, though.
Lurid is so blessedly agreeable about eating what I cook. But it goes both ways, since her tastes have certainly improved my cooking and caused me to incorporate more um quinoa and kale and look this is the coast we live on. My one regret is her firm dislike of portabella mushrooms, but everyone has blindnesses.
Wife and kid are not in town right now. I'm looking at rice and beans all weekend.
Heh. Another reason I love Rory. She's always liked my cooking, except when I bomb. The worst part of cooking as a single parent is cooking when you don't have your kid. If opening a bag of chips counts as cooking.
When my co parent is away the kid and i make a bee line to the Yemeni café for endless bowls of lentil soup. Now he's starting to pitch in with cooking though and it's awesome! Collaborative BLTs awaited me when I got home from the office this evening. Few things finer than a BLT.
Back to the original post, doesn't the presence of another adult in the household make cooking more satisfying only if the other adult likes what you cook?
Yes, it's hell not to have that. But I managed to make separate dinners for Lee and the kids one night this week, and that at least was appreciated. Sort of. I wish I could quit completely.
And I really shouldn't be complaining. Things are better. She complains if I don't cook for her specially but I don't respond back or engage. And she's now unloading and sometimes loading (badly!) the dishwasher and also folding clean laundry so all I have to do is load/run the dishes and put all the laundry away. It helps a lot. I am just sort of fed up on the food front, ha ha, and it never stops.
That really does sound hard. I think if I were in that position I'd be back to frozen peas for everyone. And, I don't know, spaghetti sauce and slices of cheddar. "There, you got three colors, eat em."
Yeah, I hate when you have to do "Here come the airplane, open up the hangar" with an adult.
That sounds pretty sketch, if you ask me.
Well, it depends which orifice is meant by "the hangar."
41: Does it make you feel better to complain? Because if it does, then maybe you should.
9, 11. It must be said that still frozen peas are dead good. But not as a main dish, often.
45: It helps to see that other people think I'm not being unreasonable, but I think it's not worth having people here dislike Lee and think I'm an idiot for staying here. So I should probably just read others' comments and feel reassured. The cooking and dishes stuff is just one disagreement I take very personally and have a hard time not getting totally furious about it, in which case I do want to vent. With other things I'm doing better.
Jammies and I just had an argument about how to interpret certain of Hawaii's dresses in light of the "no straps under two inches wide" rule. I was annoyed that I wasn't granted the position of expertise.
Also, Jammies conceded the argument in the super frustrating "Let's say you're right because I hate arguing and do not want to hear your reasonable points, so I'm shutting this down."
Does this help?
Because you were born with rulers for hands?
I just had a debate with Zardoz about whether she should be pulling bottles out of the recycling.
I contended that no, she should not.
#48 "no straps under 2 inches wide rule"
This is a dress-code rule from her school, right? Isn't she like five? WTF?
Maybe small straps are a choking/strangulation hazard?
50: Teapot is currently trash-obsessed, but so far he's suuuuuuper into putting things into the trash and not so interested in getting them out again. There was a lengthy interlude this morning in which he picked up a bit of grot from the floor, carried it over to the kitchen trash, requested that the trash be opened, dropped the grot in the trash, peered in to see where it had landed, waved goodbye to the grot, pushed the trash closed, waved goodbye to the trash, returned to the hallway for another bit of grot (we are well supplied), and repeated the whole performance. This is in principle an improvement over his putting everything from the floor into his mouth, but right now his preferred posture for the leering stage has him gumming the rim of the can.
Zardoz recently figured out how to open our trash can and, yeah, is quite fond of gnawing on the edge of the bag and reaching in there to see what's too be found.
Son the elder once commented "this is the kind of meal I like!" to a meal of pasta, peas, and ham, which is the kind of lame crap I make when my wife is on call and I have 0 minutes to prepare dinner. As someone who generally enjoys cooking and exploring different tastes, I felt a bit discouraged.