Meals I don’t make anymore

During the season of Lent, we don’t eat meat on Fridays. There are a lot of good alternatives to using meat: tuna melts, grilled cheese and tomato soup, and fish fillets among many other choices.

On one Friday this past month, Michelle and I had diverging schedules, and she had eaten before I got home. What shall I make? I looked in the pantry, where I knew I had a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. When it comes to boxed mac and cheese, there is only one choice, and that’s the brand name!

But I don’t make it much anymore. Long gone are the days where it would be easy to whip up a box of that and, as long as it wasn’t a Friday in Lent, cut up some hot dogs. It’s a favorite of most kids!

Except my kids are rarely home for a meal anymore. They’re busy getting educated and adulting. So I wondered, “Why do I even have this on a shelf anymore?” The truth is that, after years of eating mac and cheese on a regular basis, Michelle and I were kind of sick of it. If we really want that meal, I’ll make a homemade version of it, one with real cheese, not the powdered variety.

That is only one example of a meal that is no longer made now that the kids are gone. Chicken nuggets? Pretty rare, and it’s usually chicken tenders (same thing, different shape). The idea of buying the boxed frozen “meals” makes me shake my head no. 

We used to buy a lot of Lunchables for those evenings where we had to leave early for a game somewhere and would be on the road around supper time or early enough that the kids needed something to nosh on prior to the game. I happily saunter by those in the grocery store now; no need for those packages!

Sometimes it’s not that I don’t make a meal anymore, but how I do it. The kids used to enjoy having a pancake made in the shape of their first initial. So a J and an A would appear on the griddle! I guess I could just make M pancakes now.

Another thought that has to go into meal planning is how much of something to make. So many meals would get gobbled up in their entirety with two kids at home, especially as teenagers. Make a hotdish? Gone. The aforementioned homemade mac and cheese? We needed to divide the container into four equal parts so we all got some. Spaghetti and meatballs? Rarely any left.

That last one has been one of those adjustments. I still make spaghetti plenty, but now I usually leave out the meatballs. We’ve grown to like the chunky garden vegetable variety. But without the meatballs, we might eat a bit more of the spaghetti. And, of course, I only need to make two slices of garlic toast instead of four.

On the rare weeks that I’m home often enough to cook for both of us a lot, we tend to have plenty of leftovers. This has to be planned as well. If we build up too many leftovers and I can’t keep up by using it for my lunch the next day, we’ll have a leftover supper, which is nothing to sneer at.

We discovered this recently. On consecutive days, I made sauerkraut hotdish, pork chops with a blackberry sauce, and scalloped potatoes with ham. I had plenty for my lunches the next few days!

The sauerkraut hotdish is a different example of how things have changed. Michelle and I absolutely love the dish, but our kids would rather eat plain white bread than dip a fork in anything with sauerkraut. Clearly, we’ve failed as parents. With neither child at home, though, we can have meals we really enjoy but which got the blech factor from our offspring.

And gone are the days where I would wander the cafeteria on lunch supervision and subconsciously note what the students were eating, only to let that seep into my planning that night. Of course, the kids would exclaim, “We had that for lunch today!” Now I don’t need to be concerned about that, as recently, when I saw the students munching on pulled pork, which sounded like a grand idea!

Of all the things that I was worried about when we became empty nesters, food planning was actually one I thought about a lot. But it turns out that it’s been an easy adjustment, a matter of counting and planning a bit more, but it’s not as if our menus have changed drastically.

Except for more sauerkraut!

Word of the Week: This week’s word is spanghew, which means to throw violently into the air, as in, “The child hated potato salad so much that, when his parents’ backs were turned, he proceeded to spanghew the container as high as he could to get rid of it.” (This has become one of my new favorite words, right alongside defenestrate, to throw someone or something out a window. Hmm, a violent connection?) Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!