About Me
Mom-Based Cooking
Once you start reproducing offspring, dinner is no joke. I’m trying to compile meals that are easy to cook and easy to clean, that are healthy, budget friendly, and meals that at some point in their lives, my kids were actually willing to eat.
What’s for dinner?
They are hungry, right now, and they don’t want anything you suggest, or at best, they all want different specific things. Dinner is timed in the day during bath time, homework, after school activities, and making sure you got your shit together for the AM drama. Cleaning the kitchen before and/or after is a fun additional step.
I usually have no idea what’s for dinner, but I still have to make it.
About the Food
Delicious for Them, Easy on Me…
Sometimes, I’m trying to get my kids to eat healthy food they don’t want to eat, but sometimes, I’m trying to get them to eat cheap, “plastic” food for budget reasons. There’s a chance that someday I’m going to have to feed them Wild Cattails because it just seems that pesky Armageddon is always lurking around the next corner now a days, and I fear my little Zoomers will most likely starve to death to make a point before they will eat something they don’t want to eat.
Of course they are no where near starvation at all. I just worry about stupid shit all the time because I’m a mom.
But I am prepared to make cattails delicious in that crazy chance I must. But most importantly, I have found some ways to make our normal every day crappy food satisfy my children’s standards. Whether I’m trying to feed them Spinach or Ramen Noodles, I doctor up the food with flavor and mad kitchen skillz that they probably won’t eat other people’s cooking if I’m the first to die in a Zombie Apocalypse.
I don’t think I’ve thought this through.
About the Mom
Sometimes, often, almost all the time, we don’t want to cook
A lot of recipes and chefs and food blogs are seemingly under the impression that we WANT to cook and have all the time, space, tools and gadgets to cook with. But when you got multiple kids, multiple responsibilities, and sometimes multiple personalities as a result, meal planning starts to feel like a burning, blistering item on your to do list.
Nicole Knepper explained this situation well when she compared making dinner to herpes in her book Moms Who Drink and Swear.
“You can go all day and try not to think about making dinner, but it’s still there, lingering, lurking, mocking you…. No matter how stress free the rest of your day has been, thoughts of preparing the evening meal keep popping up like an oozing, festering sore you can’t ignore.”
Between being too busy to cook, or too tired, sometimes too hungry, whatever maybe I’m just lazy and I’m allowed to be, but most of my meal planning surrounds the ideas or vibe of easy, quick, painless, least amount of effort for both cooking and aftermath cleaning.
The kids were playing outside with a kiddie pool and those cheap dollar store crayon looking water blasters. My neighbor got me with the water hose, and you can’t hear her laughing maniacally in this photo.
Hi. I’m Michelle.
I wanted an easier method to help me meal plan, and my recipe box is non-existent. So I decided to put my recipes into a blog. I actually use this blog for myself all the time, but it’s a work in progress.
- I need an easy way to track nutrition
- One kid is pre-diabetic so we carb count
- I keep trying to improve my budget
- Sometimes I’m broke and need a go-to cheap dinner options list
- My kids often use this blog to help them choose dinner
As a single mom of 3, I have learned that I’m not the mother I thought I’d be. Motherhood is hard. I was in the Air Force, and I feel like everything I learned there about self-discipline and anti-terrorism only somewhat prepared me for motherhood.
Cooking Goals
Moms have too much on their plate and not enough spoons.
The things we have to do as mothers for our children, and their best interest, is a full plate. Add the things society tops onto it, their unrealistic expectations that don’t often serve the children’s best interest, and our plate is more than full. A lot of us moms don’t have enough spoons to dish it all out.
Regardless, the kids need to eat. We want them to eat healthy shit.
The easy button is usually the unhealthy option, like fast food, restaurants, pre-made food at the grocery. So this puts us at having to cook more often than not.
It also seems that the healthier food is more expensive than the unhealthy food.
It also seems that healthier food tastes bad and unhealthy food tastes delicious.
It really is just overwhelming. And so my main goal is to figure out the hard stuff away from dinner time, and get that info out in an easy to absorb way so that when I am in the heart of, “What’s for dinner,” and making decisions, sometimes at the grocery store, I can look at my site, and make better life choices without analysis paralysis.
Of course, I want lazy meals that are minimal effort, not only to cook but also cleanup. And I want it to taste better than restaurant food because I have to fuckingeatthisshittoo.
Core Values
Embrace the Chaos
Be the eye of the hurricane. Don’t walk into the wind. Let the wind walk with you.
Kids are chaotic. No matter how many strangers in public tell us, “Control your kids,” we can’t make people do what we want them to do. Trust that if we could, we wouldn’t waste that precious gift on our own children. Definitely their dads. But we’d form a New World Order where we don’t have to implant nanochips into people. Why has nobody else seen the “Pinky and the Brain” level of psycho in the idea of, “Control your brats!”?
But the fact is we cannot control them, and the ethics of such a beast is questionable at best. But we can guide them. We can embrace the Tao of their Chi and manipulate it by going with its flow, and harness the power of their chaos as weapons against our enemies, like the PTA. Sorry my kid got chocolate on your dress Karen. Sorry. I mean we can go with the flow and redirect their Chi in a more positive Tao.
Make Every Carb Count
Eat what is worth getting fat for. If it’s not worth it, then don’t eat it. Eat something healthy instead.
We have to count carbs to an extent in this house because of medical reasons, so we go by this concept that we can eat the carbs that are delicious and well worth it. But if it’s not delicious and well worth it, but carby, then go for something with less carbs. We all eat things with great intention, usually it tastes good or satisfies a craving. But we all also have that food and drink that we eat just because. It tastes eh. We barely noticed we ate it. Or drank it. And so, don’t waste carbs, or fats, or calories, on that.
Follow Your Intuition
I have a very unscientific theory that moms know best, somewhere deep inside. Like something about the bond of carrying said child in our womb and donating some genetics and the whole process of birthing creates some weird spiritual bond to where our instinct, and intuition, kind of knows already the stuff that is best for our kid, given their unique individuality.
That doesn’t mean that every decision we make is the best decision. But there’s a gut instinct that we sometimes ignore that shouldn’t be ignored. I’ve never regretted following it, but I have regretted ignoring it, justifying going against it, arguing with it…
We are allowed to be lazy
Or crazy… whatever. No where in life does it say I have to be anything. Or not be it. Don’t let other people define what you are allowed to be or feel.
Motherhood is hard. We aren’t actually lazy. Despite our best efforts, the kids won’t let us. So our idea of lazy is still busier than non-parents and non-active-parents hard working.
Yesterday, I was lazy because migraine, so that means I laid in bed all day and fed the kids two meals, rescheduled the kid’s appointment, and dealt with some money.
Street Cred
Michelle Grewe is a published author, graphic artist, Photographer & a single mother of 3 children. Her recipes have been featured in Popsugar, and her writing about motherhood featured in Blunt Moms, Mamalode, and several anthologies including Lose the Cape, Never Have I Ever. You can find her ridiculous author site at michellegrewe.com
Get in Touch
Email me at michelle@foodmykidswilleat.com