It's Day Four of National Blog Posting Month and I have missed another day. I had the best o intentions yesterday, and even had several good ideas - I simply ran out of time.
Yesterday consisted largely of work. We've been renovating our bathroom for months now, and I mean almost a full renovation that includes new plumbing, new wiring, and even new subflooring. We've been going slow and steady, working on the weekends. And when I look at yesterday (plus so many weekends that preceded it), I see why the blog has dried up a bit. There has been no experimentation int the kitchen - just a focus on nourishing food that will carry us through the weekends of labor on the house and provide something quick to eat in the evenings during the week. This is a different type of cooking, one that might be closer to what our ancestors did when the bulk of their time was devoted to physically demanding manual labor and maintaining the homestead.
By necessity, we have stepped away from the sauces and multi-dish dinners and have been instead creating simple, hearty one-pot meals - soups, casseroles, and things like that - dishes that you can pack with vegetables, meat, and other things needed to fuel an active day. Plus you can portion it out to reheat for future meals.
This more old-fashioned rhythm requires one day out of the week to prep the meals for the next 4-5 days. It's frugal in terms of both time and money, and I suspect my working-class and farmer forebears managed the food budget in this manner. But i'm not sure it's very interesting.
And I think that's part of the challenge for me. One of the concepts I've been trying to put forth in this blog is that creating fine dining meals is possible in the average kitchen with things you can find in your grocery store. So, when life changes and this type of cooking gives way to allow other things to happen, where do I take this? Hopefully, by the end of this challenge, I'll know.