A Gracious Hostess

My parents went on a birding expedition to the Antelope Valley on Saturday. While they were trekking through alfalfa fields, my brother (upon promise of a McDonald’s lunch) and I decided to hang the outdoor Christmas lights. No ladders necessary, but it did require much crouching and crawling around on the roof. The next day I stumbled around, barely able to move, as my boyfriend snickered. I hadn’t been so sore since the first (and last) time I went water-skiing: New Year’s Day, 1996. Some of us, it seems, aren’t meant to do more than sit, stand, lie, and take the occasional brisk walk, with any deviation bringing unacceptable results.

I had a poor man’s oil change this weekend, too. Here’s how you can do it: wait until enough oil has leaked or burned off (takes approx. 9,000 miles) that your oil gauge starts bouncing around excitedly whenever the car is running. When the needle starts sitting at “empty” for long stretches, you will begin to hear an alarming rattle coming from the engine area. You are getting close. Just before the engine seizes (it’s kind of a gut-feeling thing), add several quarts of oil. (I got some extra mileage out of the McDonald’s lunch, as my brother did this part.) A new filter is recommended.

The big day is almost here! I asked my boss if he would mind my coming into work a little late on Wednesday so I could go get my turkey as soon as the market opened. I explained the importance of having first pick, lest you end up with a turkey on the undesirable end of your weight range (e.g., I ordered a turkey in the 14 – 18 pound range, but I have no need for an 18-pound turkey; 14 pounds is even a little large, though the cats will be pleased.) He agreed, with some eye-rolling.

The Plan
Tonight: Buy Brussels sprouts and clean room in preparation of sister’s arrival (though, really, why?)
Wednesday evening (unless sprung from work early!): Rinse turkey and put on rack in fridge for professional air-cooled effect, prepare sweet potatoes, chop up veggies for stuffing
Thursday: Everything else

More to come.

So about the vegetarian thing: it’s not been a complete crash and burn, since most of our meals are still meat-free, but a full-blown transition to the ethical and environmental high ground hasn’t happened. Color me not surprised!

With that out of the way, let’s talk about meat – or, more specifically, what goes on it. If my free trial of SPSS hadn’t run out a year ago, I’d include a neat scatter plot to show, in no uncertain terms, that my family prefers their meat dishes to have a sauce. It took me eight years to wrap my head around this striking and entirely obvious correlation. Why try to make something that people like when I could just as easily make something they don’t?

Well, because I like sauces, too. I use the term loosely, since I’ll count anything that’s damp and kind of pourable. Over here we run the gamut from mango salsa (popular with some) to gravy and pan sauce (popular with all). Last week I bought some pork tenderloin, seared it in a skillet, poured in a mixture of Dijon mustard, white wine, and something else (chicken broth?), and stuck it in the oven. It was all I could do not to make it again the next day.

…Instead, I used a “simmer sauce” from Trader Joe’s. It was even easier! It looked a little gelatinous after bubbling away with the chicken in the oven (this was not the Trader Joe’s-sanctioned method of preparation), but a good whisking fixed that. We ate it with crusty bread, not the recommended pasta, which meant one fewer pot to clean and, consequently, a happy cook.
Too cute for sauce!

The Halloween potluck at my office is tomorrow. We’ve been encouraged to “dress up and make the day a little more fun.” Last year I went as a cowgirl – with boots, hat, the whole deal. Who even knew that Brooks & Dunn had a women’s Western wear line? My sister is braving the mean streets of Chicago in the awesome boots, however (and she should send me a picture to post), so I came up with a new costume idea: Laura Petrie! Capris, pearls, flipped hair, false lashes…I think it sounds totally cute, except I could never pull that all together at 6:00am on a Friday. If I could, it might weaken my justification for looking so sloppy every other day.

My boyfriend and I ate at a vegan restaurant for dinner last night. Neither of us is vegan, but tempeh and dairy-free ranch dressing sounded tantalizingly weird. Anyway, it was his idea.

…But only because I’ve been trying to eat less meat (says she who was carrying on about fried chicken not 24 hours ago)! My family is game – even my brother, kind of. He’s awfully environmentally-minded, so with a quick reminder about greenhouse-gases-as-direct-result-of-beef-production he was more or less on-board. As a common sense bonus: it’s much cheaper eating less meat, especially when your mom refuses to eat anything that didn’t spend its short life running around in green pastures while grazing, rooting, scratching, etc. Let’s just say that Whole Foods isn’t selling its happy cows for $2.99 a pound.

Like most of my enthusiastically committed-to great ideas, I’m not sure how long this will last. I can’t realistically imagine taking meat out of rotation entirely, since I’m having a hard time coming up with ideas for even two weeks. I can just see my sister (the only actual vegetarian in the family) rolling her eyes. But then, she isn’t cooking for our brother. Also, my vegetarian meals tend to rely heavily on cheese, eggs, and restaurants. Since the goals, if you will, of this exercise are to (1) Save the Planet, natch, (2) spend less, and (3) be healthier, it makes no sense to go buy a brick of cheddar, which, while tasty, is neither cheap nor particularly good for you. This is not to say we can’t eat some cheese and some eggs – there are a lot of exceptions and gray areas in this plan – but I’m trying to avoid having them take center stage at every meal.

This is what I’ve come up with:
Week 1
Sunday: Homemade pizzas, salad
Monday: Black bean and squash chili over sweet potatoes
Tuesday: Corn chowder, salad
Wednesday: Linguini, marinara sauce, salad (you guessed it!)
Thursday: Fried chicken (but it’s the LAST CONCERT)

Week 2
Sunday: Fish, maybe? I’m ok with some cheating.
Monday: Baked penne with tomatoes and olives, salad
Tuesday: Grilled portobello burgers with tasty, as-yet-undecided toppings
Wednesday: Monday’s leftovers
Thursday: Thai noodle soup

So far, the pizza has been the only thing that everyone’s liked, although I have high hopes for the baked penne. We’ll see. Laziness often kills these grand plans before they even get off the ground, but having it in writing might guilt me into sticking with it. Or lying.

My job has, dishearteningly but not surprisingly, resulted in a closet full of business casual outfits; even my going-out clothes seem to have that distinct safe-for-the-office feel. But what my wardrobe lacks in flash (everything) it more than makes up in Ann Taylor synthetics perfectly suited for sitting at a desk or sorting the mail in completely unstaged photographs. It’s predictable, machine-washable, and inoffensive if you don’t mind cardigans.

Gold star for anyone who senses a segue into food metaphor!

Judging from the lengthy editorializing on the subject in my collection of celebrity-authored cookbooks, everyone should have a repository of staples, a safety net of dishes to which you can turn time and time again. The authors, naturally, make this sound like a good thing, the culinary equivalent of a little black dress, not those gray pants I wore twice last week. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Green salad
I’d feel weird making a dinner that didn’t include something green. Nine times out of ten, this is it. But last night we had sugar snap peas and the earth kept right on spinning.

Pasta
Where to begin? No one’s excited to see this on the menu except in its more complicated forms – macaroni and cheese, stuffed shells, lasagna, spaghetti pie…unfortunately, it’s linguini and jarred sauce that fills my menu gaps.

Chicken
I don’t like making chicken since it seems to require endless hand/cutting-board/utensil-washings with hot soapy water (not that I don’t apply this degree of sanitation to all food preparation!). The advantage that can’t be overlooked: everyone (except the difficult vegetarian sister) eats it.

Couscous
I only discovered this about a year ago, and I wish it’d been much earlier. It’s so easy! I’ve heard that couscous is fluffier when steamed instead of dumped into a pot of boiling water, but I guess I’ll never know for sure.

Pork Tenderloin
As versatile as chicken, but I’m not so crazily anxious about undercooking it. Strangely enough, this means it’s always overcooked. Looks super awesome on the grill, though!

It’s a fair start. But lest complacency get the better of me (ha!), I might start allocating some of my limited creative capital to dinner by taking “one recipe and then using it to champion a whole set of different meals.” Jamie Oliver, that sounds really lovely; it also sounds a lot like accessorizing, which, as my mother and sister might point out, is not a part of my skill set. But with a little time and ingenious reworking, my basics will surely “delight everyone at the table.” (Would that it were so, Ina!)

I’ve written earlier about my inability to think well on my feet. At work it makes for all kinds of awkward interactions, particularly when I need to, like, interact. At home, though, menus – and their requisite lists – let me simply follow a set of instructions, a task at which I am exceptionally gifted.

I work with a Sunday through Thursday calendar, since we eat take-out Mexican on Fridays, and everyone fends for themselves on Saturdays. I hate going to the market more than once or twice a week, so if you’re a likeminded (incredibly practical) person, well-planned menus become essential. Slightly wilted produce isn’t exactly a tragedy, although you may be told otherwise.

Monday is my menu-sketching day. I have a little spreadsheet. This system gives me most of the week to second-guess my choices without wasting paper! I write up the final draft and accompanying grocery list during 30 Rock, and the end product looks the same as my mom’s always did – menu up top, list below:

I’ve tried typing my lists a few times but felt, for no good reason, really stupid pulling these out at the market. Since the last thing you want is to look foolish at the grocery store, I’d recommend the handwritten list. Classic, serviceable, and one day they’ll make an unappreciated gift for your children.

So here’s my approach, tried and true, mostly:

[Saturday: Shopping and cooking-in-advance day, made more agreeable with the promise of a drink and a dinner I didn’t make at the end of it.]

Sunday: Something that takes a little more time, like one of Martha’s “Dinner for Four in About an Hour” (apparently meant for weeknight meals!).

Monday: Something that will leave leftovers, which will be made into something “new” (croquettes?) on Tuesday.

Tuesday: See Monday.

Wednesday: A dish that’s been lurking in the freezer from a Saturday make-ahead session. Can’t have too many of these.

Thursday: Something new, no quotation marks! I should rethink this placement within the week because everyone’s always too tired to be satisfactorily impressed.

The formatting lesson ends here, sorry to say. Eventually you’ll need to pick some actual food and make it look like dinner. And every month lovely menus spring, fully formed, from the pages of Gourmet, Rachael Ray, the internet, et al. – just choose your preferred level of cute and you’re off. The editors seem to have good, if anxiety-inducing, intentions, what with their pretty, balanced mains and sides and thoughtful wine pairings. So let’s forget for a minute that my family has tastes that seem incompatible with every recipe ever created, and that I nurse a blind reliance on ten dishes. Change is, ever so faintly, in the air.

Spontaneity in the kitchen certainly has its place: Let’s open another bottle! And I think the cat needs a bath! I would never begrudge anyone – least of all myself – a little bit of freedom to make unwise domestic choices.

But as a supremely self-aware person, I know my limitations, and on-the-fly meal making is always an unwise choice. I’m sure some people can handle it beautifully, just as I’m sure that someone, somewhere, still does regression analysis by hand.

In case I haven’t been perfectly clear, I can do neither, and that is why I rely on weekly menus and, of course, Excel.

Unfortunately, readers, this is not a blog about statistics. It’s a blog about feeding your family a “decent” (definition forthcoming) dinner most nights of the week – nights when you’d rather not be cooking, nights when they’d rather be at Claim Jumper. And what’s the best way to feed a family of fussy eaters when you arrive home, fresh-faced and smiling warmly, at 6:15 (besides take-out, which obviously would be everyone’s first choice)? Why, with the assembly and execution of sensible menus! It’s a simple idea that is, let’s be generous, a little frustrating in its implementation – just ask my mother.

Clearly, the world has been waiting with bated breath for a new voice to inspire and lead in the arena of menu planning, like a Joan of Arc who knows the layout of the grocery store. Who am I to deny the masses? I am but your humble servant.

Let the planning begin before I drown in all this gratuitous punctuation!

Beets!