It's what's for dinner

One of the things that I failed to appreciate about my mom until I left home is that she always made dinner (although I think we called it supper then), by which I mean, something hot, usually involving a vegetable. I don't remember my mom ever saying sheepishly to her hungry spouse and offspring, "I don't feel like cooking, how about a bowl of cereal?"

I hate making dinner. Haaate it. It's my least favorite chore. It's not necessarily because I can't cook. I can usually manage to create something edible, although I have yet to perfect the science of getting, say, the chicken and the broccoli and the rice and the rolls all ready at the same time. (There are those among you who may be surprised that I make and serve broccoli. It's true! It's best when roasted: Toss with olive oil and salt, spread on a baking sheet, put in 400 degree oven for about 8 minutes. It's delicious! Delicious as broccoli can be, at least.) It's also not necessarily that it's hard to cook when you have a 1-year-old clinging to your leg saying "Ma! Ma! Ma!" and a 4-year-old running about saying, "Mommy? Can I paint? Mommy? Can you open this play-doh for me? Mommy? Can I go outside? Mommy? Can I have a cookie? Mommy? Mommy? Mommy?"

I just find the whole process tedious and time-consuming and absolutely not what I want to be doing at 6:00 every night. And yet we all have to eat. What to do?

Well, I've found a solution and it is good. I signed up for a session at The Mixing Bowl. It's a meal-assembly-place wherein you choose a number of meals from their menu, they procure and prepare the ingredients (slicing and dicing and whatnot), you (meaning me) show up and assemble the meals, and then bring them home and pop them in the freezer and voila! Meals for the next two week. What could be easier? And it's all customizable (no mushrooms for me, no bell peppers for him) and fairly healthy -- everything's made from scratch. And not all that expensive, really, considering. I can serve a frozen dinner and a bag of salad and some milk (actually some Silk, which is the only kind of milk my daughters will drink, and although it tastes distinctly odd to me it's chock full of nutrients!) and I'm done. Woohoo! I guess the only problem will be if the meals turn out to be not very good. Or if certain Members of the Family do not like them. To which the solutions will be Peanut Butter and Jelly, which can be found on the second shelf of the pantry and the top shelf of the refrigerator, respectively.

What's definitely NOT for dinner is the item featured above. I'm never going to win an award for nutritional soundness but I long ago vowed never to give my children Lunchables, which seem to have negative nutritional value. (Plus I had one once and it was abysmally bad.) But they've reached a new low with this "Mess with your Mouth" crap. Sprinkle this processed chicken stuff with sour candy powder! Why? Mallory saw a commercial for these things and immediately desired them. I ignored her. Then we saw them at the store (while buying hot dogs, I admit shamefacedly, BUT! they were all-beef hot dogs with no byproducts!) and asked for them again. "Mallory, these are disgusting," I said. "You know what this is? It's a cold chicken nugget that you dip in sour powder. Does that sound good to you?" She admitted that no, it did not. "The commercials you saw want kids to think these are really good, but they're not. They're really horrible," I said. She pondered for a moment and said, "Why do they DO that to kids?"

Good question.

ART for the Day
Phoebe is clearly a genius. Last night she pointed to the letter "B" on her Learn-n-Play (or Kick-n-Learn or Something-n-Something) Piano and said, "Buh!"

The fact that she calls almost everything else "Buh" is immaterial. She'll be writing this blog within a few weeks, mark my words.