Fed Up

What is with everyone needing dinner every single goddamned night? My god, it's relentless! How have we not come up with a better way to address this yet? I've heard that there are actually women who can produce a colourful, balanced, palatable meal that doesn't include day-glo orange cheese or twinkies night after night AND do all the other stuff that goes into having something resembling a life. Since school started, I've been concentrating on making dinner. Yesterday I looked up and realized that I had done nothing but cook dinner for roughly seventeen days. I don't think I can live like this.

So I've been experimenting with cooking in bulk. You know, where you cook big batches of stuff or cook more than one thing at once? Conventional wisdom has it that you freeze the excess for easy consumption later on, but that would entail emptying out the three half-empty cartons of ice cream and forty-seven leftover freezies, plus the frozen peas we use whenever someone hurts themselves, so instead I'm making everyone eat three dinners on Tuesday and not feeding them again until Friday. I'll let you know how it goes.

We had our sort-of-bi-monthly dinner party that we do with four other couples last Saturday. My friend Janet did the main course. My friends Janet and Collette are neck in neck for brutal, no-holds-barred competitiveness. Janet also has this enduring, endearing ability to say things just a little bit wrong, which I love. We were at Janet's sister's house and we played this game that her sister Susanne likes, where everyone writes down the names of as many famous people they can think of and puts them in a hat, then you split into teams and one person on the team has to pull names and yell out clues to makes their team guess as many names as possible in a minute. You can imagine how quickly this degenerates into a meleƩ of name-calling and obscene gestures, particularly when the group is fairly evenly split between literary nerds and physicists ("Frequency conversion guy" "What the..." "Hertz!" "Guy who wrote the Count of Monte Cristo!" "Oh fuck off"). Plus there's this weird phenomenon whereby, no matter what, some obscure person like the third baseman for the 1934 Yankees will show up multiple times. So for the magic moment of the night, it's kind of a tie between Janet pulling a name, saying 'he's a singer' and then glaring demandingly at her team for the next seventeen seconds, and the fact that she kept calling her incomparable veal osso bucco 'osco bosco'.

I love my friends.

Comments

Nicole said…
Dinner! I know. I KNOW. See also: constant needs for snacks and lunches. I don't even have a stand-alone freezer, just the freezer compartment on my fridge, so batch cooking is pretty much not an option. Although I do have a whole bunch of freezies in there. I wonder if freezies have a best-before or expiry date.
SuziCate said…
Dinner with you guys sounds like fun. I like cooking (most of the time) so I'll cook and you guys entertain...fair?! Cooking is easier now that I'm not carting kids everywhere. but when my kids were your kids age it was a pain in the butt to get everything done and dinner, so I get where you are coming from.
Kelly Miller said…
What is a freezie?

I cook every night because a) everyone would die of starvation otherwise and b) I don't have it together enough to bulk cook. We do a fresh meal, then leftovers, then a fresh meal, then leftovers, then dinner out/takeaway, then crapshoot, then start over. I also swear by soups!
Pam said…
Oh I hear you sister! Why tonight, I first poured meself a nice wine, checked e-mail then, sufficiently relaxed, whipped together a delightful dinner of quesadillas and somewhat thawed peas (no immediate injury requiring them.) Ah, the delights of flying solo. Stay tuned for tomorrow when we will have pasta for the 3rd time this week.
Mary Lynn said…
Cooking is one of the few householdish things I don't mind doing. It's all the damned dishes to clean afterward that drives me crazy. I have this habit of cooking dinner then walking away from the kitchen to do other things and forgetting all about the mess that I left behind. Then, at around midnight when I've finally convinced myself it's time to go to bed I walk into the kitchen to get a glass of water and--Arrgh! Who left this mess in here?!? Oh yeah--that would be me.

Oh--and I would totally love that famous person guessing game. Sounds like fun.
Anonymous said…
Do let us know how the eating all the dinners on Tuesday thing goes. I think the idea has legs, if it can be pulled off. I would certainly steal it, anyway.
Amber said…
Dinner. Sigh. Please report back if you have discovered a way to get around it. Other than frozen pizza and fast food because we already do that.
I'm so done with dinner. I told my husband last night that I've made dinner for the past 14 years so now I think it's his turn. He laughed but I wasn't joking. I want a chef.
Julie said…
i would so love to do the bulk cooking thing. but with only the small fridge freezer, it's pretty much a no go. *sigh* let me know how the 3 meals on tuesdays goes. i agree with amber, it might have legs.

and a note to mary lynn: woman! if you are doing all the cooking, ed has to do the cleaning. that's the rules at our place. if you want to eat, you clean. works well.
Alexandra said…
I'm guilty: I do the bulk cooking thing. But, hey, it keeps me sane.
Patti Murphy said…
That's why there's this new "Cereal for supper!" campaign.

Sometimes I wonder why I even try because my kids are so picky.

The other day I made homemade chicken soup, took the time to puree the veggies and added their favourite noodles. All they did was bitch and complain. Then I called them shitheads and they started to cry.

Another memorable moment in my life as an imposter-mommy.
Jane said…
I try and try to cook in bulk - but then, you just described the inside of my freezer and why my attempts rarely fit.
Ms. G said…
I don't have room in my freezer either. When i buy meat if I don't cook it within 3 days it goes in the freezer. Forever. When your kids are older, maybe you can try what I do for a break. Twice a week we have eat what you find night. Call dibs on leftovers, mic something, eat cake, I don't care as long as we show up at the table at the same time. Then we can see who won the best meal.

Your friends sound fun to me. I love Dumas and trying to comprehend string theory. But I don't know anything about baseball: )
Fame Throwa said…
Man, I've been so absent on the blog scene this past month...

However, felt compelled to suggest getting a crockpot! I'm just getting into it now, but 2 of my sisters live by them. Usually the recipe is something like "Put these ingredients into crockpot. Turn on crockpot. Come back 8 hours later." So easier, and it makes enough for the whole family.
Tracy said…
I so wish I could bulk cook and freeze. That would be so easy. However that being said, there is the food fussiness that my children and husband experience. I'm grateful I work all nights and weekends so I usually don't have to worry too much about suppers. I will through some sort of meat product in the oven before I leave and they can make what ever else they want to go with it. God forbid should one of those side dishes be veggies!!!!!
Sandra said…
I'm still laughing at the "empty out the peas we use in case someone gets hurt"...that's so true! That's the only thing frozen peas are good for.
I hear your pain sista! I spend more time trying to figure out what to feed my family...and what everyone will eat because nobody likes what the other does, and then hubby comes home and is all like, "Tacos again?" Taco up your...
Well, we need a revolution I think.

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