It's 10 PM on Sunday, Do You Know Where Your Next Meal Will Be?

I don't mean in the sense of "It's a recession and we're all stretched thin." I mean in terms of actual location.

Well, I'm hoping I do. I'm hoping it's at this cleaned-off table.

I'm about to do a post about another recent happy marker of progress in the Learning How to Cook process that has been this blog thus far.

But with all the progress I've made in the cooking arena, there's really one area where I remain shamefully troglodytic: eating.

I'll spend all this time cooking and then revert back to old, haphazard, disorganized, thoughtless, careless eating.

As mentioned in some of my original posts about why I started this blog, I don't have a personal history of organized, structured, actual sit-down-at-a-table meal-eating. And while I've learned some great meal preparation techniques through the learning process of the past few years, I still do not have an organized, structured, actual sit-down-at-a-table meal-eating life.

And one can't help but wonder: what good is learning how to cook great meals if I don't actually sit down and eat them like a civilized human being instead of grabbing a piece of something and trying to keep the crumbs off my keyboard because I didn't even put it on a plate?

I overeat for many reasons, but I've been realizing lately that one of those reasons is that my brain is not registering the experience of eating because I'm not truly conscious of doing it. So I'll eat a meal with 90% of my brain elsewhere, and then later, have a feeling I need to eat and so I will, even though I'm not technically hungry.

You are supposed to listen to your body for cues of hunger in order to know when to eat. But that, in my experience, isn't the whole story. And telling yourself that story is one surefire way to feel like a failure if you ever try to reduce your food intake for weight control reasons.

I am starting to think lately that having a certain kind of conscious emotional experience of eating is probably just as if not more important than the actual physical experience of it. So many diets and weight loss schemes seem to approach the problem as though those emotional needs are to be somehow ignored, tamped down, burned through with sheer willpower and machismo. But then those same plans fail, so maybe it's not really effective to think that emotional needs are somehow inferior to physical ones.

I don't know enough about the Harry Harlow wire monkey/cloth monkey experiment beyond the broad brushstrokes, and I'm really too sleepy right now to try to tease out the connection to this burgeoning personal hypothesis I'm forming, but it's in there somewhere: my dinner table! terrycloth monkey! comfort and food! These ideas are on simmer, they're not quite ready for consumption yet.

But in order to help narrow things down, this week I'm tweaking this whole experiment a bit. What I'm focused on this week isn't really the cooking, it isn't using up all the produce in some perfect matrix, it isn't learning some new culture and cuisine. It's just eating actual meals sitting at an actual table.

In order to make that a little easier, I did a bunch of pre-work this weekend.

Made a bunch of stuff so that the actual meal prep can take less time, leaving more time for the meal-eating.  So now, it's just a question, really, of keeping that table cleaned off this week so that I can sit at it and eat some of the above like a civilized person.  Wish me luck, I think this is actually going to be a lot harder to do than any cook-a-thon.

Cooking Resolution #4: Readiness

In 2009, I would like to be prepared.

Photo via NoelZiaLee on Flickr

I have so far resisted the urge to buy Carolyn and Will's extra deep freezer, but I nevertheless want to keep my regular freezer well-stocked over the next year.

Over the holidays, I had two sets of houseguests, and reaped the rewards of some pre-planning I’d done. I had taken advantage of being housebound with the freak Seattle snowstorm to do some make-ahead cooking.

When my guests were here, I did, of course, still wind up in the kitchen longer than I should have, but significantly less than I could have, had I attempted to come up with the same volume of output without that pre-work. 

And in addition to being prepared for out-of-town visitors or planned dinner parties/book clubs/etc., I still entertain some fantasy that I will once again have a people-dropping-in kind of life. I had that back in Phoenix, but not here. I’m newer to Seattle, super-busy with multiple jobs and projects, and have friends who are super-busy themselves with jobs, partners and new babies. But I miss what it was like in Phoenix with friends nearby who would swing by for a glass of wine, and aim to get back to it at some point. If might sound silly, but for me, having breadstick dough in the freezer feels like I’m making some tiny step back towards reclaiming a lifestyle that makes me feel happy.

I don’t only want to stock my freezer for entertaining purposes, though. I want to have quick and tasty meals for myself, too. I work from home, and it seems like I should be able to stop and take the time to make myself a lunch from scratch every day if I wanted.

The truth is, though, that some days I don’t change out of my pajamas out of busy-ness, not just sheer laziness. On those days, I don’t have any more time for cooking than I would if I were in an office. I’d rather not resort to processed or packaged food, or worse, eating sweets mindlessly because they’re faster to get at than a salad. So a full freezer will help me stick to a healthier routine between houseguests, too.

Here are the items I want to make sure I always have one variety of available at all times:

Savory Little Breads - I made the Rosemary-Thyme Breadsticks, Parmesan Black Pepper Biscotti and Buttermilk Biscuit with Green Onions again, and they all worked well.  The breadsticks and biscuits can be frozen in dough form and baked, and the biscotti I froze already made and let thaw, with a quick warm-up in the oven.

Sweet Little Breads - I made this Lemon-Lavender Tea Bread from Epicurious and it was delicious! I baked it in a six-mini-loaf pan, froze it, took one mini-loaf out the night before I planned to have it with breakfast, and added a quick lemon juice/powdered sugar/crushed lavender glaze right before serving. It was tasty alone or with some Pear Butter I’d also made.

Soup - I’ve noted before that my family is not a big food family, but we do have a few food traditions, and one is my mom makes a really nice vegetable soup in giant batches, which she freezes. I now do the same with my favorite soups, which came in handy with this set of visitors.

My two successes this go-round: the spicy Red Lentil Soup and a Mushroom-Potato Soup, which I will post a recipe for soon. I made the mushroom soup before the first guest arrived, froze half, and served the second when the second set arrived. The Red Lentil Soup came in handy on a night we needed to eat something a bit less sinful than all the eating out we’d been doing. My guests actually requested it another night, so it’s not just me that likes this soup. I was able to just hack another block of it out of the freezer and was able to – gasp – actually make dinner on the fly for once.

Spiced Nuts – A jar of Chipotle Spiced Nuts came in handy for a quick snack my guests could help themselves to.

They were also a good quick last minute take-along thing for holiday parties or little gifts.

In addition, they can bring a little interest to a salad, and lord knows I need all the help I can get encouraging me to eat more salads. I exist in the tension between my natural ambivalence about eating salad and my grandma-like insistence that eating adequate roughage is like a folk remedy for nearly all disease.

Salad Dressing – Obviously this is a fridge, not freezer item. I also have a grandma-like insistence about the healing properties of my SuperPower Salad Dressing (recipe forthcoming). But it’s sort of annoying to make, so I need to make sure I’m making it at my leisure, instead of at the last minute before a meal when I’m already suffering from low blood sugar and on the verge of losing patience with the whole cooking process.

Food Celebrity Beans or Lentils – This is more for me than for entertaining. Having some tasty cooked Black Beans a la Russ Parsons or Tom Douglas Green Lentils in the freezer at all times means I am halfway to a good salad or beans and rice without too much effort during the week.

Rice – I’m pretty good at keeping frozen rice on hand already for quick stir-fries or topping with lentil dals and such, but I’m putting it here so as to ensure I remain vigilant with the rice level in my freezer.

Cookie Dough – Easy to freeze! Slice off and bake a few cookies at a time! In a toaster oven, even! Fresh-baked cookies for yer guests! Simple!

Dessert – I don’t want to eat more dessert than absolutely necessary, so it seems dangerous to keep it in the house. BUT...I’d rather eat something I made myself than some junk I buy when I’m jonesing for sugar. So in addition to the cookie dough, I’d like to keep one ice cream or something on hand for myself.

And here are a few things that I don’t need to make, but want to be sure to keep on hand for entertaining purposes:

• Cheese
• Bottle of wine
• Couple bottles of beer
• Bubbly water
• Stuff for one solid cocktail (what cocktail, I’m not sure yet)