Cooking with Crap

Do you all ever get tired of cooking?

I do kind of enjoy cooking, for the most part. But, day in and day out, three meals a day (well, actually only two meals for me because my husband usually takes care of breakfast) with no end in sight because, 1) We all have to eat, and, 2) Eating is fun and it tastes good.

I wonder if it would be easier if I sold my soul and started making convenience foods.

Growing up, I consisted on a diet of: Macaroni and Cheese, Spaghettios, Velveeta Shells and Cheese, toastie dogs, Pizza Rolls, tomato soup, pop tarts, cereal, chips and cheese dip, and BBQ Fritos. My parents owned a restaurant I would get a bacon cheeseburger with french fries from there on occasion (it was always a bacon cheeseburger with french fries, even though I could have had anything I wanted).

When my mom did make a homemade meal, these are the only things I remember her making... ever: homemade milk and cheese (which was really just homemade macaroni and cheese but we referred to it as "milk and cheese" in order to differentiate it from the packaged Macaroni and Cheese that we usually ate), no-peekie stew, swiss steak, lasagna, spaghetti, potato sausage, hotdish.

That's it.

I'm not trying to hold it against my mom for how she fed me. It wasn't a big deal. It's not like she circumcised me or anything. She just didn't know any better. And I didn't know any better at that time because I continued to eat that way when I moved out of the house.

But by then, my diet had become even more limited because I was on my own and I was extremely cheap: Macaroni and Cheese (where I would save some of the noodles and add them the next day to the...), Tomato Soup, microwaved baked potatoes with ketchup, an entire box of generic scalloped potatoes with ketchup, Spaghettios, and these Spaghettio-type things called Dinosaurs (which they don't make anymore). That's it. I would literally spend less than $30 a month on groceries for myself. (But I would probably eat out at least once a week because this was back before I was married with children and Vernon and I would actually go out on dates on a regular basis.)

Then, after Vern and I were married, I graduated to the likes of Hamburger Helper, frozen pizza, Bisquick and other random forms of processed crap that ALDI had on sale.

I was also very anti-fat. I would not eat fat on anything. If I was at an event that had dinner rolls already buttered (is that a mid-western thing?), I would take a knife and scrape the butter off and look at the hostess with contempt. I would not add butter to my macaroni and cheese or scalloped potatoes. (I would not even add milk because I didn't want to buy it, so I used water.)

But now, as I've talked about before, I am very PRO fat. And I am very PRO food. I don't cook convenience foods. I don't cook foods with chemicals in them, red food dye #2, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, artificial flavorings, etc. I don't eat or feed my family refined sugar or white carbs (except for me at Mom's Night Outs, restaurants, and holidays).

Would my life be easier if I did?

Maybe, but it wouldn't be worth it.

So, I'll keep being a food snob and feed my kids their grass-fed beef, free-range chicken, organic veggies, kombucha, kefir, cod liver oil, raw honey, etc. These are the things that THEY'LL remember, which is kind of nice...