The Boy just very cheerfully helped me invent some spicy soup for lunch, full of tomatoes and peppers and onions and garlic and then he grated Monterey Jack cheese on top. It’s quite good, although I’m not normally a soup fan. I’ve been feeling a bit mournful recently, though, and soup is comforting to the whiny soul.
My inner clock is wildly confused by the time change – I keep cheerfully thinking "Oh, it’s mid-morning" until I look at the clock and realize with a start that it’s now lunchtime, apparently. I’m tired on top of my confusion, too, since I haven’t been sleeping recently but have instead decided to lay awake and staring into the murky darkness, listening to trains rushing through town on their way to someplace else. So tonight I’m going to attempt to make a gluten-free carrot cake, moist with applesauce and covered in cream cheese icing, because if I can’t SLEEP and I’ve decided to be O Woe Is Me, at least I can still eat. And thank goodness for that.
The kids love helping out in the kitchen, which has been our primary entertainment so far during the March Break – visiting friends and leaving the house being out of the question while we wait out the stomach bug. The Girl could actually do much of the household cooking herself, something which I’m rather proud of, although she’s not allowed to put things in the oven at all (she’s short!) and is only allowed to stir things on the stove if a parent is RIGHT THERE. How old are kids when they can use the oven on their own, do you think? The Girl is a steady, responsible child, but she’s still only 8, and that line between being over-protective and not protective enough can sometimes be a tricky one.
Every Friday, we make homemade pizza. When we first had The Girl, we ordered in pizza every Friday but that was expensive and unhealthy and then we moved beyond the reach of pizza delivery places anyhow and so now we either purchase a pre-made crust and go on from there OR I make some pizza dough – it’s REALLY EASY – and then my husband cheerfully rolls out the discs. The kids do one, we do the other and then we watch a movie (our one movie a week because we are No Fun) and just relax. Oddly enough though, I’ve never taken pictures of something that we do at least 40 times a year – maybe because it’s such a mundane weekly thing that it just doesn’t occur to us to take pictures. But this weekend we did. Observe!
My husband rolling out pizza dough.
I’m standing on the stairs above him, by the way. Our kitchen is SMALL and two adults cannot work in there at the same time. Also, that is a weird, weird angle.
Ta da!
That’s my Cuisinart Flatbread Oven to the left, which is just about my favorite thing in the world.
And here’s the pizza, all topped up. I’m feeling MORE THAN A BIT like The Pioneer Woman right now.
That IS broccoli on it. Many years ago, a friend of mine joyfully told me about a pizza shop that sold pizzas made with whole wheat crusts and broccoli as a topping and I thought "ew." And now I put broccoli on my own pizzas, which is how you can tell that I am a sophisticated adult and also a mean mother. There’s also mozzarella, goat cheese, sweet Thai chili sauce and red onion on that particular pizza and I feel hungry just looking at it.
And here I am – the back of my head, anyway – putting the pizza into the oven.
And it looked like a pizza when it came out but we were hungry and ate it, so you’ll just have to use your imagination.
And so that is what we do every week. I think it’s very easy to fall into these food rituals without knowing it – a friend of mine took her kids out to a certain restaurant every Sunday after church because it was on the way home but it wasn’t until she missed one weekend and her daughter wailed out "This isn’t what we do on SUNDAY!" that she realized that it had become important to her kids, something that was now part of their expected week. Routine and ritual are a huge part of family life – our Friday pizza making, another friend’s Monday soup-and-sandwiches – all of these things add up to being so much of what a family is. What foods say family to your children? And what foods say home to you?