Early in my marriage, I got laid off. After I spent my fair share of time sulking, laying around watching Friends reruns and eating cartons of ice cream, I decided it was time to kick myself back in to gear and just. do. something. Anything. Anything to elevate my mood and get me up and moving.
For some reason that is still unknown to me, I settled on cooking. Let me take a step back: pre 2008, I was a terrible cook. I mean, a really terrible cook. My first attempt at using the crock pot resulted in lots of smoke at 3am. I routinely burned chicken, probably because I was trying to cook it from a frozen state. I could barely make pasta without burning it as well. My husband grinned and ate everything I cooked, but that was only because he was too polite to do otherwise.
I entered the world of cooking filled with great trepidation and hope. I edged my way in to Central Market and simply walked the aisles, scanning the shelves for food whose names I could not even pronounce.
My first few cooking forays were not met with great success, but I was learning something along the way. Two weeks in, I cooked my first delicious and edible meal. I was elated (as was my husband!). I threw myself in to cooking with great passion, spending hours planning my meals, shopping for groceries and dicing in the kitchen. 4pm would hit and you could always find me in the kitchen, glass of wine in hand, studying the recipe for dinner that night and plotting out my best course.
My routine of cooking ebbed and flowed as my life outside the kitchen took on different forms: I spent a year in grad school, 6 months on the campaign trail and a year of teaching college classes. But you would always find me in the kitchen at least three times a week, glass of wine in hand, plotting my every move.
Then came baby.
Cooking was thrown out the window and was not seen again for at least 6 months. When I anxiously revisited my kitchen 6 months later, I realized that my days of spending 2 hours cooking in the kitchen were now replaced with maybe 20 minutes (on a good day) to throw things together and hope something edible would be the end result. Healthy wasn’t even on my radar screen.
My son is now 17 months old and we have fallen in to a better pattern of cooking with edible (maybe healthy) results. I currently have 10 go to recipes that we have been eating……for the last 3 months. Needless to say, when I saw that one of the breakout sessions for Project Mom was “Nutrition Without Breaking the Bank,” I couldn’t sign up fast enough!
I am excited to learn more tips and tricks for family meals so that I can start adding some variety. Hopefully I will see you there!
Project Mom is Sept 27-28 and you can get your 25% off tickets by using the code: DMB.
What are your healthy “go-to” meals?
**Dallas Moms Blog has received no compensation in exchange for this mini-series. In exchange for some marketing, we’ve been allowed to host a booth at the Project Mom conference; however, we sincerely hope that this marketing exchange benefits our readers more than our site through discounts and opportunities to win free tickets!
