One of the best parts of this sabbatical that I’ve been taking is that it has afforded me the opportunity to cook far more often than I had been able while I was still employed. As I am tied for least employed among adults in the household, and really don’t feel up to the task of Cinderella (I was a professional housecleaner for the better part of three years, and it still induces flashbacks), I felt that I could head off arguments at the pass by offering to cook five nights a week. It allows me to huff and puff, while actually having a pretty good time. The prep work is a little tedious, but I prefer to use fresh ingredients whenever possible, and the flavor cannot be denied. I had been trying for years to come up with a weekly menu so that we could plan ahead, and cut down on shopping trips, which inevitably produced more one-off junk food nonsense than was entirely acceptable. But no one thought that it would make much difference, and everyone sort of just fended for themselves, dirtying every pot, pan, plate, and piece of flatware which we owned, in the process. My wife would make a huge batch of something that only she (and sometimes, our son) would eat, and the adult children waited until the wee hours to prepare their own food. We were doubling up on food costs for no good reason. What, you ask, did Mr. Batmart eat during this time? Usually I’d go to Walgreen’s and pick up some sort of snack food, and wash it down with soda, or an energy drink. I worked at a restaurant, and really didn’t want to face more food preparation.
Money is tight now, however, and I am once again the unlikely voice of reason. Well, as long as I’m doing the cooking, anyways. I penned a simple weeklong menu, and then set about cooking it. I’m still figuring out what order will work best, but so far, I’ve been able to get meals done from prep to mouth in an hour or less. Sunday we had fajitas, which my wife gave me an assist on. She did up the rice while I cooked off the pre-marinated fajita meat that I picked up at the Mexican supermarket. Everybody ate, and it was gratifying to see. Bolstered by my success, I cooked ribs on Monday (they’d had a rack of them at Grocery Outlet for $4.50, so I picked up two), with my wife preparing mashed potatoes recycled from the baked potatoes that our daughter had prepared two nights before. More so than with fajita night, rib night was amazing. David actually cleaned his plate, as did my grandson. All of the adults grabbed a second helping of the ribs, and at the end of the evening, there was no food to put away. Tuesday afternoon, I was tapped for lunch service, so I did burgers and fries. I will admit that the fries didn’t really go as planned, but in failure, I’ve figured out just what went wrong, and I think I can get it right the next time that I do them. What really surprised me, though, was that my wife had forgotten to set out the ketchup, and although the ground beef was the best of the tubed variety, no one seemed no need to smother their burger in condiments. The secret there was a trick I picked up from Fuddrucker’s: I heated some butter, threw in some finely chopped garlic and Italian seasoning, and then lightly dipped the buns in the mixture before toasting them off in a separate frying pan. They were crispy, and flavorful, and gave the burgers just that little hint of class.
Wednesday night was the night that I’d been dreading: an updated recipe for my Mexican rice dish. To give a little history: when I moved out of my house at 17, and got together with my girlfriend, I wanted to impress her, but didn’t really cook that much. One of the things that I’d been able to prepare without much incident before I had moved out was the Rice-a-Roni Mexican Rice. When I cooked for Crys, I tampered with the recipe just a bit (it was a complex list of items to begin with: Rice, vermicelli, water, butter, seasoning packet), and added mild salsa, ground beef, and topped it off with some shredded cheese. Over the next few years, I would wind up modifying it to include stewed tomatoes and upping the heat to a medium salsa. It stayed that way for quite a while, until my wife and I began to live together. I wanted to try and spiff it up a bit, so I started putting in fresh vegetables, and using strips of beef in addition to the hamburger. When we moved to Not Quite Richmond, I’d found almost every ingredient that I needed to bypass the packed stuff altogether, but was stumped as to the final flavor that I was missing. I was putting in green, red, yellow, and orange bell peppers, jalapenos, serranos, yellow chilies, and a couple of habaneros, roma tomatoes, white onions, garlic, the regular round tomatoes, cilantro, and basil, as well as some medium salsa, ground beef, chopped pork, and beef. It drove me crazy that I couldn’t figure out what was missing. And then one day, when I was fooling around with something else, I popped in some tomatillos on the recommendation of my wife. The missing flavor!
I now could cut out everything that came in a box, jar, or can, and make my rice dish from scratch! Which now leads me to the final change I’ve made (and quite possibly the last): When I was up on The Island for my Holiday Vacation, I wanted to cook my wife a birthday meal. I was going to make my rice dish, was usually quite well received. We went shopping for all of the various ingredients, and I asked my aunt if we had rice back at the house. She assured me that we did, so I didn’t pick any up at the store. We got home, and I began to prep all of the veggies, waiting just a bit to get started on the rice. When it was time, I started rummaging through cabinets, and scouring all the shelves, but the only rice that I could find was a box of Uncle Ben’s. Filled with terror, I began frantically running other starches through my mind, as this dish wasn’t exactly right to do up as a soup. And then I found the elbow macaroni, and decided that, as I hadn’t any other option, I would just have to make do. And you know what? It actually came out better! Everyone except my mother had a second helping (well, and David, but it was a little spicy), and within a day, the entire gigantic batch had disappeared!
So for my dinner on Wednesday, I only slightly adjusted the recipe to remove all of the chilies. I started the veggies cooking about twenty minutes before everything else, so that I could use several ladles’ worth of the juice as the base for my pasta water. Everything just came together, and this time, everybody had a second helping (aside from the little ones, of course, who, to their credit, polished off a bowl and half between them). There was almost enough for breakfast the following morning when I came back after dropping David off at school.
My wife cooks what she likes, and she is the one who mainly eats it. My daughter and son-in-law cook things they like, but usually only for themselves. When I cook, I cook things that I like, but for everyone. Maybe it’s just that they aren’t as picky as I am, but when I’m done, there really aren’t leftovers, and tend to make a lot. Guess my nearly decade and a half in restaurants was good for something after all!
-Tex