Every night, the same question comes up, of what to make for dinner? Tonight’s no different. No leftover in the fridge to give me a hint. Instead an odd assortment of vegetables, not even enough to make a soup with. And no help to be had from family members. All four have different ideas, and I do not have the time nor the desire to accommodate all. I shall make an executive decision. Of course, it would be nice to be ‘creative’ and step out of the usual repertoire, for a change. But tonight’s not the night. I am going to go for the safest bet. Roasted chicken with potatoes, and a green salad. I can zip over to Whole Foods, buy their organic fryer, organic potatoes, and organic lettuce, and while I am at it, a few extra vegetables so I can make a soup out of the leftovers tomorrow. Preparation time, 15′ total, and I can go back to my work, while the creature’s cooking in the oven. Done.
There is a lot to be said for that roasted chicken dinner. Most importantly, it meets all four criteria in my good food book:
- Cost: a whole chicken can be stretched over two meals for four people, easily, with roasted chicken first day, and chicken soup with rice the day after
- Health: no worries to be had with natural, organic ingredients
- Convenience: both meals are easy and quick to make, less than 15′, my usual limit on week days
- Taste: it’s hard to mess up roasted chicken, plus who doesn’t like chicken?
In a perfect world, I would have a hundred ‘roasted chicken’ recipes to pick from. The reality is closer to five or six meals, that I keep repeating, from week to week. The children have noticed. Oh! we’re having crepes again . . . How about a different dressing for the salad? I have fallen into a rut. I wish I could be more creative and fancy myself as one of my French friends, for whom cooking is still very much a daily practice in effortless imagination. Once in a while, I decide to shake things up a bit, and invest in a new cookbook. Last time, was The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution, by Alice Waters. I remember being quite excited, and thinking this was going to be THE book, unlike the thirty previous volumes, that have been gathering dust on my kitchen shelf. Of course, my interest in THE book was short-lived. I found it hard to make Alice’s recipes mine. An interesting observation, given that, objectively, her recipes embody all I want in food.
I am left with the question of why? How come is it that I keep going back to these few ‘comfort recipes’? When I could so easily whip myself into shape, and start meal planning the heck out of Alice’s cookbook, gathering hundreds of perfect recipes in the process. The answer is in the smell coming out of my oven right now. The aroma from the roasted chicken, and the potatoes brings me right back to my mother, and also my grandmother’s kitchen, to my French peasant roots of uncomplicated, good food. From the many more dishes that I watched, and sometimes helped them make, only le poulet roti, les pommes de terre au four, la salade verte toute bete, la soupe de legumes, les crepes, la tarte aux pommes, and le pudding au chocolat have remained in my primal core . . .
Of course, I am fortunate, to have been wired early on to only appreciate really good, natural food. That I am a boring cook with a limited repertoire is a small problem, compared to what happens for the majority of people in America, who have been brought up to love not natural food, but fast food instead. To them, a visit to McDonald’s may bring up the same positive emotional onslaught as the one I feel when cooking my grandmother’s vegetable soup. And cooking naturally, or even cooking period, may be a lot harder for them to get into. Although hugely popular, cookbooks, recipe websites, and TV cooking shows, often cannot compete with the aroma of a Big Mac with French fries, on the side.
La Marguerite 
I tend to fall into the same category. Different dishes but the same background. Mashed potatoes with a grated raw onion, grated tasty cheese and chopped parsley is a favourite. I never get complaints about that one repeating especially if I add some finely chopped fried bacon to it 🙂
I have added my own twist to certain things but mostly I stick to plainer stuff. The boys prefer that. Look in the fridge – same old – same old but at least it gets eaten. Experiments from cookbooks seem to result in too many unwanted left overs.
viv in nz
This is the same problem at our house! I am trying to double all recipes to get more bang out of the preparation. It’s a constant challenge to put a healthy and delicious meal on the table 😉
On the need for scientific education regarding the human overpopulation of Earth in these early years of Century XXI………..
Dear La Marguerite and Friends All,
I want to at least try to gain your quick help. I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but yesterday the “AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population” submitted an idea for how we think the Obama Administration could change America. It’s called “Ideas for Change in America.”
I’ve submitted an idea and wanted to see if you could vote for it. The title is: Accepting human limits and Earth’s limitations. You can read and vote for the idea by clicking on the following link:
http://www.change.org/ideas/view/accepting_human_limits_and_earths_limitations
The top 10 ideas are going to be presented to the Obama Administration on Inauguration Day and will be supported by a national lobbying campaign run by Change.org, MySpace, and more than a dozen leading nonprofits after the Inauguration. So each idea has a real chance at becoming policy.
Thanks.
Sincerely yours,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
I don’t think it’s a problem being a “boring” cook. I’ve always said to people that to reduce food bills and get good nutrition they need only learn 6-12 recipes, 5 of which they make all the time, the other 1-7 they make on special occasions. If those 5 have a good mix of vegetables, beans and grains, then they’ll have good nutrition.
With multigrain bread or rice consumed every day, potatoes, soybeans, milk, eggs, carrots, spinach, capsicum, avocado and nuts, of those nine each one consumed every two or three days, you will have all your essential vitamins and minerals. The greater variety the better of course, but it’s not essential for good nutrition.
And with good nutrition we have good health, and a good level of energy which makes us work well, and be lively enough to enjoy one another’s company and our play.
A little while back I was talking to someone who was talking about how so much vegetarian food was just boring crap which doesn’t nourish you. I agreed, but pointed out that most food in Australia and the US is crap, full stop. Boiled vegies are neither worse nor better than a McDs cheeseburger, it’s just a matter of whether you die of anaemia or heart disease, but whichever death gets you you’ll spend a lot of years pretty sluggish and miserable.
If you have half a dozen boring but comforting meals with a good mix of vegies, beans and wholegrains, then you are doing better in nutrition and taste than probably four-fifths the country.
Plus it’s heaps cheaper… a couple we know have gone on the Lite ‘n’ Easy meals to lose weight and boasted to us that it’s lowered their food bill to “only” $200 a week… and here’s us on $80 for three, $60 for two.
Knutty Knitter, Faith, I am glad to know that I am not alone! Looking at the cooking section of my local Borders, or listening to the Food Network, you don’t get a sense of our shared reality . . .
Kyle, as usual, thank you for your insights. You always bring so much to the table – no pawn intended! And with your professional background, you, out of people have a lot to say about food, and cooking. As you may know, I am in the midst of developing a website aimed at helping grocery shoppers and cooks with their food choices. Whatever knowledge you share, I will be sure to take into account.
I came from a fairly unhealthy tradition – not things you would like to eat. I’m not a great cook and am a vegetarian. Luckily I have a small network of fellow vegetarians (half vegan the rest will take dairy), some of whom are great cooks. I’ve always had good things to try and am slowly learning how to focus on local produce – mostly for the taste in my case. The flavor of things that were in the garden an hour or two before is amazing!
Despite what many say, it is relatively easy to produce good vegetarian meals with excellent nutrition. Most of the careful vegetarians I know are remarkably healthy folk and I’m convinced the diet is part of it.
My wife is not a vegetarian and we rarely cook for each other – just very different tastes. She is a much more accomplished cook than I am and enjoys the process much more.
A few years ago her Christmas gift to me was a few sessions with a very good vegan chef who specializes in hyper fresh food. I took it during August that year and highly recommend spending a bit of time with an expert if you have the chance.
oh that’s a good post, I too am an unimaginative cook but I prefer to have good reliable recipes that are wholesome and also have low impact in terms of food miles etc rather than be all experimental with expensive imported ingredients.
That sounds like an excellent dinner, Marguerite.
I’m a self-taught cook, pretty good at making something edible out of whatever random vegetables & condiments we have on hand.
But I find that when I’m strapped for time, I fall back on the kind of cooking my mom did. Which is thankfully not fast food, but is the tater-tot-casserole, cheese sauce on broccoli school of American cooking.
I just don’t always have the brainspace for new things in food, when I’m learning stuff at work or in some other part of my life. Just like sometimes kids lose some of their vocabulary when they’re busy learning to walk.
One of the good things about eating seasonally is that, while I only have 2 beet greens recipes, we only eat them 2-3 months of the year, so there’s at least one month every spring when they are unfamiliar and exciting. And in July, when we’re tired of beet greens, sweet corn is new and welcome, so it’s at least not the same entire meal again and again.
There are quite a few recipes from the heart over at Best of Mother Earth – perhaps you might enjoy some of them!
Tonight grilled chicken, summer squash, zucchini and onion w/ garlic and soy. I made enough to cut into chicken strips for future salad meals there is enough veggies for a snack tomorrow.
you could re-name this post: Ode to a Roasted Chicken. There is truly nothing quite like the smell of a chicken roasting in the oven. It’s my husband’s favorite meal! We use the Barbara Kafka method of roasting it at 500 degrees. Mmmmmmmm…I can almost taste it now.
I’ve been savoring this post for the past couple of months; especially this part “The answer is in the smell coming out of my oven right now. The aroma from the roasted chicken, and the potatoes …”!
Shortly after first reading this, I enjoyed being a guest for dinner at my friends, Burck & Gayle’s home on a particularly cold evening. Burck was not only roasting a delicious organic chicken, he was gladly pointing out that his oven was generating enough heat that he could turn down the house thermostat and kill two energy-birds with one stone, so to speak.
For the past few months, I’ve been quite busy exploring opportunities in various other niches and corners of our web-o-sphere … still discovering my voice and learning how to make the kind of sense that feels good.
Anyhow, Marguerite, I want you to know that I often feel especially grateful to you for every time you’ve welcomed my comments here = it’s like being welcomed over for a virtual roasted chicken dinner (or maybe even a bowl of soup from leftovers for lunch) and I trust my table manners haven’t been excessively gauche and unrefined = although I will admit to feeling sufficiently comfortable (perhaps taking too many liberties from time to time) that I didn’t fear posing an occasional crazy idea or two or three …
Please keep these wholesome aromas coming = we need all the TLC we can get!
Ciao for now,
paul
P. S. = here’s my belated New Year’s wish for you and your loved ones:
Trusting you’ll enjoy
a most delightful New Year,
heavy on the Light!