Dinner Dancing

I used to have time to cook. Starting around 5:30 every evening, I would pour myself a glass of wine, pull out my cutting board and chef’s knife, and leisurely prep vegetables and meats for the evening meal. I would draw out the cooking process as long as I could, because I found such comfort in the slow, methodical process of dicing an onion, the quiet sizzle of vegetables in the pan, the anticipation of every tiny bubble in a simmering pot. Some days, I might start even sooner and get some brownies baking or mix up some cobbler before the dinner preparations began. Even on a weekday, dinner was an event.

I still love to cook, but these days dinner looks like a complicated pairs ballroom dance a best, and a frozen pizza at worst. A typical evening goes something like this: chop some vegetables during the little guy’s afternoon nap and store them in the fridge for later. (Note to self: Don’t forget to tell my husband about this so he doesn’t prep the same veggies later.) We run a few errands and play with him until 5:30, when I feed him his solid food. My husband bathes him while I fix as much of the meal as I can, and then we play a bit more—what we lovingly call “Wear Out the Baby” time—then I rock him and nurse him while my husband takes up the next part of the dinner prep. When the little guy is finally asleep, we finish dinner and eat as quickly as possible, since our son wakes up and cries 30 minutes after falling asleep. (No we still haven’t figured out why.) I often feel like dinner is a bit like those Top Chef team relay challenges when each chef has 10 minutes to prepare part of the meal, but they can’t tell the next chef what they were making. They just have to strategically prep, cook, and lay out ingredients to give them as many clues as possible. Last night this meant a stack of diced onions and tomatoes, a bit of shredded cheese, a pound of ground sirloin, and—the giveaway—taco seasoning. And he figured out that the cookie sheet with taco shells on it meant that they should be warmed prior to dinner. Good for him.

Ah, the intellectual work of cooking dinner. The criteria for choosing a recipe changes once a baby enters the picture:

1. Does the recipe require a large amount of prep work? (More than the 15-minute bath-and-pj time allotment, that is?)

2. Can the recipe be made in stages? (This includes anything from complicated stir-fries, which require you to keep going once you start cooking, to prepping fruits and vegetables that will turn brown if they sit for too long—think apples, pears, avocados, etc.)

3. Once the prep work is done, how long is the actual cooking time? (The target is either 10 minutes, meaning it can be cooked once the baby is asleep and can still be eaten before he wakes up, or an hour, which means it can go in the oven or on the stove and I have time to nurse him before the timer goes off. Or it can be grilled, which means my husband can sit outside with a beer and, if the little guy goes to sleep easily, I can join him.)

4. Once the meal is finished, how long can it sit before it a.) turns mushy, b.) gets cold, c.) overcooks, or can it d.) be eaten cold?

5. How many dishes are there? No one wants to spend their exhausted quiet time doing dishes, and no one wants to drop a heavy pan in the sink and wake up the finally-sleeping baby.)

6. (And this only applies if you’re searing meat, and I would never have thought of it until it happened on our anniversary.) Is there any possibility that the meal will set off the smoke alarm? And no, this does not just apply to novice or distracted cooks. Searing a steak perfectly does produce some smoke. Open windows, we learned, may not suffice. Thankfully, the steak sat well under foil and did not cool off or overcook, thus satisfying both b.) and c.) of item 4.

And all of this only applies when we eat what we want after the baby goes to sleep. When he starts eating the food we eat—and we start eating dinner at 5 pm like all of the parents I used to judge—I’ll have to add considerations for textures, spices, potential allergies, meaning has he eaten the food for 4 days without breaking out, etc. And while we’re on the subject, this is one of the hardest solid food rules to follow. Am I really going to give him a dish of pureed onions or garlic for four days to make sure he’s not allergic before I can blend up our casserole?

Do I overthink things? Possibly. But for me at least, it’s worth it if it allows the few quiet hours after he’s gone to bed to be stress-free. And, slowly, this method of meal-planning becomes second nature. And if I want something more complicated, I know I can have it—thankfully, my husband is a great cook (wink).