week 30: food tips for you and your family
I have a dear friend who started a nutrition consulting business several years ago to help busy bodies find a healthy diet. I signed up for her class when my first child was nine months old: I wanted to rebuild my body and energy, recover from childbearing, breastfeeding, sleep deprivation and pretty radical changes in my lifestyle. She customized a “rebuilding” diet for me and I have stuck to most it for three years. I changed my breakfast menus to include much heartier meals with lots of protein (I eat eggs, beans, cheese, and occasionally rice, sausage and veggies); I eat seasonally (fruits and veggies are delivered to our door from a local farm, once a week) and I take vitamins daily (or as often as I can recall, mostly vitamin C+D).
Recently, my friend wrote a humorous account of the various types of food personalities she encounters in her clients. I read along, looking for my “type” : instead I found that she should expand her list to include the working parent. I described this person (myself) as “on her feet all day long; doesn’t eat much junk food because she has banned it from the house and from her handbag; can’t recall the last time she had a two course sit-down meal in peace because she is regularly interrupted by children, colleagues, teachers, baby-sitters, laundry, delivery men, the urge to get to yoga class etc… As a result, the busy parent doesn’t prioritize chewing!!!” You can see the blog post here and my comment here.
This got me thinking: what are the things I do to bring good food to my mouth and my family’s belly every week? Read on for three habits that work really well for me.
1) Make a roasted chicken every week: I have a really simple receipe which I make every Sunday and it kills three birds in one stone. We have a delicious Sunday meal, I get fresh chicken broth for the week to come (as you may recall from an earlier post, i drink chicken broth to rebuild my body from childbirth, or to give me warm and stamina on a difficult day), and I have lots of leftovers for my son’s Monday pic-nic lunch and my daughter’s purees.
2) Hire a cook to make dinner for your family as often as you can afford. We do it weekly. This started two years ago when I had a “talk” with my husband about division of labor in the kitchen. I wanted him to do two meals a week. He could get take out, order in, cook, whatever he wanted. He did not try any of the above; on the first week after our agreement, he hired a friend of his to cook in his stead! He then hired her for 6 months (the duration of her stint in cooking school) and she has now been with us for more than two years. She comes on Wednesdays, in the thick of the week when we all need a break. She cooks a hearty meal for that night, we set a nice table and she stays for dinner, so that we can catch up with her. She also makes a soup or stew for the following days.
3) Get a house account at your local grocery store. I can’t keep up with shopping for my family. There are times when there is nothing fresh in our fridge and the last thing I feel like doing is running out to shop while my nanny stays at home with the kids. And I certainly don’t want to bring them shopping as being in a store with my three year old is funny at best and mostly nerve racking (son: “can I buy this?”, me: “no”, me: “what’s in your mouth?”, son: “Mmmm”, me: “that’s theft, you can’t just eat things in the store”, son: ” then we should buy it”). By having a house account, I’ve made it possible for my nanny to shop when she is walking the baby so we have opportunity to replenish the fridge in the middle of the week. If you live in San Francisco, we have a house account at Bi-Rite.
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