I made dinner tonight.
This is a momentous--huge--occasion in our household, as I am kitchen-handicapped. But for any number of reasons, I feel compelled to at least get a grip on some rudimentary culinary skills. I made a really simple dish--brown rice, steamed asparagus, and herb-roasted chicken cutlets. Someday, some other post, when I am feeling less dispirited and disgusted with the lot of women, I'll post the results. Also, when I find my camera cable.
But for now...
...WTF?
How do women do it? How do they have careers, marriages, and children, to say nothing of alone-time and social time? Something's gonna get shorted, and ten bucks says it ain't the job, the husband, or the kids cryin' the blues. (Except when they feel neglected because Mom went off and did something for herself).
I get off work at 6:15. It takes 15 minutes to get to the store, another 15 minutes to run through the store and pick up items for dinner, and all in all I'm home by 7 PM. After five or ten minutes of prep-work (hand washing, digging out ingredients and utensils), I start prepping the food and cooking. Dinner is prepared by 7:50, and I'm lucky (lucky! Can you believe it! Lucky!) to have a few minutes while the meal is cooking to clean up a little in the kitchen, start a load of laundry, scoop the litterbox), and I am done eating by 8:15. And there's still more kitchen clean-up to do.
It's now 8:45 PM. and ideally I should be in bed by 11. Forget hopping on the exercise bike, forget scrubbing out the bathtub. Forget all sorts of things I had on the to-do list. I'll be lucky if I sort through some of the mail and get some writing done. This is insane. How do women who are wives and mothers as well as workers manage to do all of this and run their lives?
Or am I doing something wrong?
You probably have a day off, at least one, maybe two. Shop for the whole week on that day, don't do it piecemeal for each...meal. Have a loose menu planned for the week, so you are not scrambling for meal ideas. Cook a few things ahead of time - chili, casseroles, what have you.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely one-pot/one-dish meals, where your protein, vegetables and carbs/grains/etc. are all slopped into the same cooking implement, that way you are not messing about with a million things at once.
Practice makes perfect, you are off to a good start.
Do as much as you can, before hand.