I have been cooking for myself too long. And by “cooking” I actually mean shopping for cheap frozen dinners and microwaving them.
Yes, I have a pretty good handle on the quickest, cheapest, and most delicious (in my opinion, anyway) of the food.
The last time I had to cook for more than myself, I wasn’t very creative about it and determined that I must lack said skill of coming up with dinners.
So when I went on my last grocery shopping trip, I was pretty sure I was going to fail at that one just as badly. Except what happened was something more like this:
“Sooo… We’re going to get more chicken. What are we doing with the chicken again? Ooh! Never mind, the Cornish hens are on sale 2-for-1! Lets get those! What else do we need? Hmmm… Oh, you know what we could do? These pork loins are also on sale. We could make my mother’s pork loin and apple recipe. You liked those, remember? Oh, and look they’ve got shaved beef. We could have cheese steaks for dinner tomorrow.”
And with that, we had lined up five meals. In the meat aisle. In just about 45 seconds.
I was promptly told by my boyfriend that I’m good at meal planning. (I still don’t think so.) But apparently when I have someone to bounce ideas off of who remembers what all we said we were going to make that week, I’m not too shabby. Good thing he likes to cook. I’m bit more rubbish at that bit.
On the other hand, our delivery of local vegetables arrived today. While he’s complaining that he doesn’t know what to do with any of it, I promptly cut up a summer squash, a cucumber, and threw it in thyme, salt, pepper, and olive oil. Insta-salad! And again – I have traditionally failed at the CSA thing as well. So… I dunno. Perhaps he has inspired me to be more creative by claiming he doesn’t know what to do with this stuff…
Or, pressure to come up with something had made me more creative?
I don’t know. But apparently I’m a little more inventive than I think. Either that or I’ve just had more food experience since the last time I had to cook for more than just myself.