Created For This

The Kitchen

     To say I’d learned a little in the past three months would be an understatement.  I had never spent so much time in the kitchen, it wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy cooking, but my meals were beginning to grow dull, even to me.  Week after week, I would prepare meals from experience, rarely using a recipe, nor buying new ingredients, and then what seemed to be a moderate inconvenience to stay-at-home all the time began to stir uncommon thoughts.  I began to worry about worst-case scenarios.  What if this pandemic causes a food shortage?  What if we run out of food?  What if we consume more than we need leaving us starving at the end of the stay-at-home order?  I was actually happy that I was carrying excess weight, convincing myself I would survive longer.  I concluded that it was up to me to manage our resources well so that none of us would suffer. 

     It was easy for my mind to run away from reality.  Before I knew it, I was creating circumstances out of thin air.  I didn’t share a lot of my thinking with those in my family, but they became more aware that I was reducing portion sizes and restricting the open snack time munching that was customary.  How is it that our minds trap us into believing that things will get worse rather than better?  Where do we place our trust in circumstances that seem out-of-control?  Truth be told, we control far less than we believe we do.  Times of prosperity only camouflage our insecurities.  It is times of uncertainty that challenge us to depend on our Creator.    

An Over Abundance

     It didn’t take long for me to peruse the contents of our pantry, refrigerators, and freezers.   I felt truly fortunate that our food supplies were overflowing.  There was no need to panic.  Many people in fear had cleared grocer’s shelves like one does when a major blizzard is announced.  This didn’t make us better than anyone who did.  It gave evidence that we had been plagued with scarcity thinking all along.   I’d never lived through the Great Depression as my grandparents experienced.  Once they had lived through it, food became significantly important to them.  It was what they always offered as a gesture of love because they knew how difficult it had been to live without provisions.

     A quick review of the contents showed that many items were getting dangerously close to their expiration date—a common occurrence in our home.  In the past, we had periodic cleanings to reorganize the shelves of our pantry and would discover that we had items that were one to two years out of their recommended ‘use-by’ date.  I now considered, how dangerous it would be to consume products that were two or three months past their expiration.  We soon discovered that some items lasted well-beyond their recommended disposal date, like milk, which can be used for cooking. 

     My weekly trips to the grocery were always accompanied with a shopping list of items that I needed to restock, but more times than not, I would find myself adding things to the shopping cart that I could not live without, an impulse buy.  I also developed a bad habit of doubling.  If I put one box of elbow macaroni on my shopping list, I would often pick up two.  Why not buy a second for some date in the future when I wanted an extra box?  If someone were to unpack our groceries, they might have assumed that I was buying for two families, not a family of four who lived five minutes from a local grocery store.  As much as I hate to admit, trips to the food pantry to offer donations only came when I would reorganize our own pantry and decide something no longer had the same appeal as the day I put it in our shopping cart. 

     For the first time in the history of our household, I began to consider how to make use of products that I would once relinquish due to disinterest.  I took it as a personal challenge to see just how empty I could make our pantry before I returned to the grocery store.  I was pretty successful.

Meal Planning

    Meal planning was not a new concept for me.  On many occasions, I had tracked my food consumption in a phone app to help me shed a few unwanted pounds.  I am often ten to fifteen pounds above my desired weight and often would find my personal aggravation the key to changing my eating habits.  But I would often veer off course for several months if not a year.  Gradually the weight would be a problem I could not ignore.  No one in our household had as slow of metabolism as I, so as I would gain four or five pounds a month, everyone else consuming the same content, and sometimes more would maintain their weight nicely.  Tracking seemed to be the only guarantee that I would not continue to add weight to my moderate five-foot four-inch frame.  I had grown tired of using the app, and I had stopped taking pictures of each plate of food I consumed.  Both were practical tools I used for weight control.  Now was time to begin tracking again, but not just for myself, but for the entire family to make sure we did not over-consume food because we were either stressed or bored.  I made it a personal objective to discontinue throwing food away.  If someone didn’t eat all the food on their plate, it went into a storage container to be added to their next meal. We had developed some very wasteful habits.  Meal planning would become essential if we wished to manage the resources that were available to us.    

Savings Add Up

      The Amazon® package arrived on the front step; I hoped it was the parcel for which I had been waiting.  I had been waiting for the 8 x 8 aluminum pans to arrive.  Our upcoming vacation would be much easier to enjoy with meals prepared in advance.  For the past several months, I had only ordered a handful of meals from local restaurants, either takeout or delivery.  Everything else had been prepared in our own kitchen.  With the stay-at-home order in place, we hoped to reduce the chance of something from outside entering our home and making us sick with the very infectious CoVid19 virus.  Only an occasional well-planned trip to the family-owned grocery store became necessary.  A vast majority of our household purchases during the past three months were made online with either curbside pickup or home delivery.  Hand soap, garden seeds, nail clippers for the dog, a thermometer, and non-perishable food items like coffee were ordered through our Amazon Prime® account without concern for delivery charges.  Perishable refrigerated or frozen foods were ordered either from Sam’s Club® or Meijers using a shopping service called Shipt®.  I quickly discovered that shopping the old-fashion way with a shopping cart moving up and down the aisles had precluded my understanding of what our purchased items costs.  I would wait for the news at the register but could often estimate from based on the content of my cart how much our groceries would cost, give or take $5.  But now I was able to see the price for a gallon of milk, a tub of margarine, or a bag of shredded cheese as I placed each item in my online cart.  I would often review my full cart and begin to make decisions on what to keep and what to remove.  What I consistently found was that I could reduce our weekly (or more like bi-monthly) shopping expenses by $100 or more when someone shopped on my behalf, working strictly from our shopping list.  The one time I returned to our old grocery routine, my bill shot back up, impulse buying.  I now realize how easy it is to return to old habits when one doesn’t pay attention to their own personal pitfalls.

New Ideas

     It was time to take advantage of having more time to spend in the kitchen by renewing my interest in not only meal planning but trying something new.  It had been a long time since I had tried new recipes.  My first adventure was attempting to make tempura-battered vegetables.  The method was pretty straight-forward, and I had all the simple ingredients on hand.  I chopped carrots, zucchini squash, and summer squash diagonally.  I made onion petals and washed snap peas.  After coating them with batter and frying several batches, my counter was full of a variety of new flavors lightly battered vegetables.  I investigated how to freeze the extras learning that I needed to first freeze them in single layers before grouping them in airtight freezer bags.   Reheating them in the air fryer made a perfect side dish for several meals.  I was pretty impressed with how closely my tempura tasted when compared to one of our favorite restaurants.

     Bread was not readily available, so since I had some yeast stored in the refrigerator, I decided to look up some homemade recipes.  I had used all the prepackage bread mixes that had been long stored in our pantry within the first several weeks of the stay-at-home order.  A YouTube® video produced by a professional bread maker gave me some new secrets to proofing and creating precisely the right consistency that I might find at a local bakery.  The approach to making bread was both tasty and simple.  I had never realized how easy it was to make bread from home; homemade pretzel’s followed with a slight modification to the recipe.  This bread-making was followed by dinner rolls, cinnamon rolls, and breadsticks, the smell of yeast bread filling our noses.   As I continued to make bread, I learned that diced jalapeno and parmesan cheese pleased the spice girl in our family.  The bread-making venture was a huge success and has become one of my weekly routines.  

     In addition to tempura, bread, and some new variations on casseroles and soups, I learned how to successfully encrust fish and chicken with nuts, cornmeal, parmesan, or potato flakes.  A family favorite was homemade ice cream made on an old appliance buried in the freezer that may have only been used once or twice in the eighteen years we’d owned it.  The more I experimented in the kitchen, the higher my confidence increased.  I decided to resurrect an old swiss steak recipe that I hadn’t made in years because it never turned out as good as I expected.  Trying a new technique by searing the steak, coating it generously with flour, and cooking it in broth for about six hours in a slow cooker, this has now become a new family favorite. 

Use of Appliances

     For years, I’ve been the queen of appliances.  I owned a bread maker, a juice maker, a Kitchen Aid® mixer with multiple attachments, an air fryer, an instant pot, multiple crockpots, cast iron skillets, a food processor, an ice cream maker, a yogurt maker, and many more kitchen gadgets.   Many of these items have set on shelves collecting dust for years.  I had even overgrown the room where I stored all these appliances and began to fill the metal shelves in our garage with items seldom used.  I decided that it was either time to use them or lose them.  As I learned the skill of bread making using my Kitchen Aid®, I realized I no longer needed my bread maker.  It offered no noticeable convenience.  The juicer was impractical using far too much fruit and took hours to clean up after use.  Little by little, our closets were cleared of unwanted and duplicate items, and large totes were filled in the garage, waiting for the opening of local donation centers. 

     I began to scan the Internet and open cookbooks that I had once purchased because the pictures were so appealing that I found great entertainment in looking at them, but never attempting to use them for the purpose for which they were designed.  I was a collector of cookbooks and took nearly 30 unused books to our local library just before the stay-at-home order was given.  A homemade batch of ice cream, the first time use of a cookbook focused on sorbets, ices, sherbets, gelatos, and yogurts, was delicious.  Learning new air frying techniques came from both YouTube® videos and the two cookbooks, which were sitting restlessly on my shelf, hoping to make a comeback.  I made Kale chips, apple chips, onion petals, roasted nuts, breaded eggplant, and encrusted fish.  I also learned to add water beneath the perforated surface to darken dinner rolls creating a pretzel top and to make egg souffles.  I had never used baking pans or ramakins inside the cooker but learned that any baking dish that can go in the oven could be used in an air fryer, parchment paper too.   Adding popcorn seasoning to potatoes and roast carrots, or even spices like nutmeg, add a new flavor dimension.  An appliance I had frequently used has become even more valuable.   

Meal Preparation

     Before the pandemic of 2020, I had begun to cook in larger quantities, making one dish for consumption and another packed away to be given away when the need arises.  On several occasions, when making dishes like lasagna, instead of making one, I would make five, freezing four.  During the consumer panic, when many grocery items were restricted, it was much more challenging to cook in this manner.  Having several backup meals handy in our freezer brought both peace of mind and significantly easy meal preparation.  Now that purchase restrictions have been lifted to some degree, I will again return to making multiple batches to save time and create the added convenience of freezer-to-oven meals.   

Charity

     Like many people sequestered to their homes, clearing closets, pantries, cabinets, and storage units of unwanted items became an activity that represented a productive use of time.  This time of adjustment has allowed us to see more clearly that sharing our good fortune with others is the right thing to do.  Just like evaluating which kitchen appliances, pots, pans, and utensils had lost their appeal, clothing, shoes, and odds and ends of everyday life found their way into storage bins to be given away once the donation centers reopened.

Appreciation

     During this unprecedented time that people were asked to stay-at-home to reduce the spread of CoVid19, I recognized that the things we’ve taken for granted could no longer be overlooked.  If there was only one lesson to learn during this time, it is to pay attention to life.  It is easy to fall prey to materialism.  The ‘got-to-have-it’ mentality reveals that items become far less appealing once we own them, bringing little satisfaction when we look for a place to store them.    

Finding Her Place in the Home

     Now that three months have passed, I realize that I have the benefit of looking at life differently.  I’ve learned the joy of serving my family from the kitchen and enjoying great conversations around the kitchen table.  I’ve found my place in the home.  This sweet adventure of 2020 was found, hidden in plain sight.