Wifeology 101: Cooking

Since becoming married, I have tried out a new thing: cooking. I have never really done this before. In college I never ever cooked. I survived on easy mac extreme cheese and peanut butter sandwiches. Really. Ask my roommates. Oh and sometimes lean pockets. But they always burned my tongue.

Post college life didn't get much better. I was just never motivated to come home from work and spend an hour fixing a meal for one. Plus I didn't ever have any essential ingredients on hand. Casey and I usually ate dinner at different times, so we sort of did our own thing. Casey really liked to cook, and was good at throwing things together without a recipe and it turning out great. While I was inspired by her ability to cook, it still didn't result in action for me. I continued to eat easy mac, and would also add to the dinner rotation the slightly more sophisticated scrambled egg toaster sandwich. I would also often times resort to the classic bowl of cereal. I think I could eat cereal for every meal. It is so good. My current favorite is vanilla cream frosted mini wheats, now only available in the Kroger select brand. I think Kelloggs has stopped making the vanilla cream. And trust me, it IS different from the regular frosted mini wheats.

When Greg and I were dating, we began cooking together during the week. For a while we were cooking once a week. It was fun finding recipes, learning together, and saving money from going out to eat. I also began a series of Tuesday night "cooking lessons" with my parents. I would go over to their house once a week and they would pass down their cooking knowledge to me. It was so fun.

Since we have been married I have been enjoying learning to cook. I am not the best, but I really have had fun finding recipes and trying new things. I am learning though that it takes a lot of planning. We do all our grocery shopping on Sunday. Because I mean really, is there any other option? How else to you maximize the lifetime of your fruit? Bananas go bad so fast! And there is a very small window of yellow to green ratio that I will eat mine. I think 70/30 would be optimum. Anyway, so by Sunday I have to know what I will be cooking on which nights. Then I have to figure out what should be frozen, what can survive until the designated day, which vegetables will go bad first, etc. After-work activities such as bible study also have to be factored in. That day has to be deemed a leftovers day because it is too much chaos to rush home, cook dinner, shove it in our mouths, and run out the door in time for bible study. I am not very good yet at remembering to prepare for dinner by doing things like thawing chicken, or pre-marinating. For example tonight we were supposed to have grilled chicken. Oops. I forgot to thaw the chicken and had to run and errand after work so by the time I got home there was just no time to start from the beginning. Oh well. It's a learning process. But I enjoy it and it makes me happy to know I can help prepare meals for our family....even though it is just a family of 2 now. Hopefully one day I will have more little mouths to feed.

I need more recipes though. Sometimes I will search forever on the internet and not decide on any recipes because certain ingredients scare me. So if anyone has good trusted recipes, please pass them on. And just to let everyone know, I don't do ALL the cooking. Greg is really sweet and cooks some too. He makes really good steak and his marinated chicken always comes out way better than mine :) I wish I had started on the whole cooking thing a long time ago.