Home Cooking

As I was cleaning up after dinner a few years ago, my 4-year-old daughter Josie kissed me goodnight and turned to run upstairs so her dad could put her to bed. "Oh, and Mom? Can we have that beautiful porridge again for breakfast tomorrow?" And off she went.

I cannot stand to even visualize my children going hungry, or myself for that matter! If disaster struck today, this hour, this minute, how long could you provide sustenance for your family with the food store you have on hand? Would you even have drinking water available?

Life has afforded many of us the privilege of weekly grocery shopping and ready access to water. However, any one of many factors could easily turn this cushy situation around.

A large pizza with pepperoni, olives, mushrooms and extra cheese please! Oh, the thought of it alone makes your mouth water, doesn't it? How we all love pizza! In the United States alone, over $20,000,000,000 (yes, all those zeros add up to 20 billion) was spent on pizza in 1994.

With our income reduced, we're trying very hard not to let anything in the kitchen go to waste. This takes some organization, and I'm not famous for that. So I'm researching home kitchen management techniques.

My mother was the Goddess of Leftovers. I say that with all of the awe and respect she deserves. Around dinnertime, we would enter the kitchen drawn by smells that, although mouthwatering, we couldn't quite place. Was that cheese? Broccoli? Ham--no wait, hamburger.

When we asked her what was for dinner she would give us that "Mother's Secret" look and say it's a "Concoction!"

I love to cook. I love to eat. I am picky and will not eat things that have no nutritional value (excluding chocolate, which I mentally justify for its medicinal value). I am also the type of mom who looks at recipes and instead of using them, I change them to my own liking and consider it MY personal idea.

In many families, morning is a hectic and hurried time. Frequently parents feel fortunate just to get everyone out the door fully dressed each day. Serve a hot cooked breakfast every morning? Not a chance. Breakfast (if it's served at all) often consists of grabbing a toaster pastry and a quick glass of juice as the family runs out the door racing headlong to work and school.

I've discovered that taking an hour or two on an occassional weekend to prepare breakfast items for the freezer, takes much of the insanity out of the weekday morning rush.

Without beans where would Jack be? Though there are no magic beans outside of fairytales, they can seem to magically stretch your food dollars.

"Oh, beans," you may say. "They take too long to cook, and then...well...YOU know. Plus they're boring. How many times can you eat chili?"

What is THAT!" hollered Josie when I opened the box we'd just gotten in the mail. Floating in the plastic bag inside was a whitish disk with brownish threads hanging from it that looked more than a bit like a very flat jellyfish.

"That," I said, "is a kombucha...thingie," I finished lamely. How to explain to a child what a symbiotic collection of bacteria and yeast (aka "scoby") is? Because that's what we'd just gotten in the mail, a "thingie" commonly called a kombucha mushroom, even though it's not a mushroom at all.

Finding a meal that will please the entire family is often difficult. But what if you ALSO have to take into consideration someone's food allergies? Even an old standard like spaghetti or macaroni and cheese may no longer be an option if your child is allergic to wheat or dairy.

Initially, you may decide to make separate meals for the allergic child, and feed the rest of the family normally. After a while, however, this gets REALLY old--twice as much cooking, and you may still be getting complaints of "I don't like that!" from both sides.