The highs and the lows of cooking

A week ago today I was honored to be spending the entire day cooking at the James Beard House in New York's Greenwich Village.  The JB Foundation is located in his old home and it has been preserved as he had used it, in his honor.  Chefs who are asked to cook there know that it is one of the great honors that can be bestowed on a chef and they prepare for it in earnest.  The members of the foundation and the general public are the guests of honor on your appointed night and they are die-hard food and chef experts.  I was asked to accompany a former colleague to help with his special dinner, and he had amassed a stellar group of chefs to help him execute his vision on this night.  It was fun, an honor, and a privilege to be there.  The menu was very specialized Piedmontese cusine and it was all delicious and beautiful.  I was able to spend three days in New York by myself, making the rounds to the latest great food shops and restaurants and it was a great time.  http://jamesbeard.org/index.php?q=events_beardhouse_022712

Re-entry back home was tough after living the life in New York for a few days.  I got right back on the dinner schedule of blt night and taco night.  Then my husband told me he is tired of  our dinner routine and he wants me to make more salads for dinner, and at that, he just wants a small salad for dinner.  We are going on vacation this week and then when we come home, I need to do a new dinner plan with shopping lists because I can't make three dinners anymore.  One for me, a salad for him and then something for the kids. All of the family meal suggestion books don't work for us because my husband and kids are very picky and aren't going to eat "fun angel hair pasta with peas, mint and shrimp."

The more people I talk to about this, the more I hear that dinner time is a battle ground for many families.  I'm thinking about discontinuing "dinner" at our house, or 86-ing it as they say in restaurants.  Lunch is fine and so is breakfast.  After years of ingraining in to me and my cousins the importance of cooking and "the family meal," my grandmother, later in life and after I was married and trying to make the right dinners for my husband, told me that it was "perfectly all right and perfectly nutritious to have a nice bowl of cold cereal for dinner."  Information that would have been helpful when I first started dating my husband and I was making a huge effort to cook gourmet meals.  When we were dating and first married, we were busy with work and I had a regular 5:45pm yoga class, I probably managed to cook a big gourmet dinner once or twice a week.  After we had kids and I was home to cook gourmet every night, it eventually became too much for him and he wanted me to cut back and cook "light" and then very simply and now to just make small salads or small sandwiches.   I really don't know how to cook light or over-simply because I spent years executing complicated dinners to go out hot and perfectly all at once in high end restaurants.  It is simply not possible for me to make soup and salad for dinner. So I think dinner is over.  We are going to have breakfast or lunch for "dinner" and see if that works.

I just paused writing to pick my son up from pre-school.  I was talking after with a mom who just moved here to the Boston area from California.  She is as sweet and nice as can be and we started to talk about summer vacation plans.  She said she wants her first summer here to feature the quintessential New England vacation and she asked me about New Hampshire and Maine lake areas because they love lake vacations.  I told her it was all beautiful and she wouldn't have a hard time finding a good place.  She said, "all I care about is NOT cooking dinner every night.  I do like to cook but I am so sick of my kids saying yuck every night when I feed them and I need a vacation from that."