Column: What do you like to cook?

Oooo, complexity.

Installment #5 of the Wondering (and Wandering Column). Read more here about my intentions behind this column.

Question: What do you like to cook? For yourself and your family.

Dear Reader and Everyone Else,

Before I embark on an answer, I want to name that casual conversation about food right now in March of 2025 can feel like avoidance or, at worst, insensitive, or… it could be one of the tactile type of realities that reminds us we are humble humans. I tried to read The New Yorker yesterday and couldn’t do it. Nothing against them. It’s me. Increasingly, since my late 30’s, I have little appetite for intellectual spins and impressive gymnastics-like language. I want to be in a room with hearts, with hands, with art; yes with brains, but brains connecting to heart, hands, art.

So, food.

Can of worms. First, my mother is a culinary school trained chef who fed us so well as children. Family dinner. Homemade meals. Vegetables. Desserts. All the things. I’ve never seen her under-eat or over-eat. She tries everything. She doesn’t restrict. She’s open to all new tastes. She truly loves food and making food for others.

I grew up determined not to be domestic.

A little tiny bite from a little tiny human.

I wanted to be “out” in the world “doing something” and in the 1990’s cooking and out in the world doing something seemed mutually exclusive to me. I showed little interest in learning how to make any dishes. My mother’s mother, Pat-Pat, raised four children while her crew of high school women friends went on to have prominent careers out in the world. Her best friend was a cryptographer in WW2, the only woman in top secret government meetings, traveling all over Turkey and other countries nearby. Another friend of hers became a well-known journalist hobnobbing with all the famous people and playing with language. My Pat-Pat, a whip-smart woman with big ideas, always grieved that she hadn’t done something. Of course, “doing something” is subjective.

Here’s the deeper truth: I love colors and shapes and plating food and herbs and ultimately the rhythm of feeding a family. I’ve gone through phases where my fridge and pantry are stocked full of what I have scratch MADE: pickled onions, beet sauerkraut, granola bars, bison bone broth, butternut squash soup, herb-infused butter, four different salad dressings, grass-fed gelatin gummies, so many beans, seed crackers, gluten-free rye bread (risen next to the woodstove), cashew butter molasses cookies, chicken green chili tacos, rosehip and yarrow tea, on and on, oh my gawd, homemade bison jerky or a river trip. [Keep reading for the flip side.] I enjoy making small plates, like tapas. Especially when the girls were little, I would arrange five little ceramic bowls on a wooden cutting board for them: different textures, different tastes, sisters eating from a shared rainbow plate. My body would drop down about 20 notches and exhale. Ahhh, everyone has been fed.

Other weeks, the fridge is empty.

All I can do is put peanut butter toast on the table.

Yesterday, my 11-year-old said, verbatim, “Wow, it would be really great if we had some food to eat in our house when I’m trying to make lunch for myself.”

A comment like that stokes the matrilineal rage fire, makes me want to pull out my list of have-dones and to-dos, grinds my chest into the dirt.

A random iPhone search of "food plates" led to this. Plus a few cuties.

For all the sometimes colorful meals, I often don’t prioritize a big grocery shop and I hear myself saying out loud to no one but the walls of the house, “I’m overwhelmed; I can’t do it.” Maybe if I chose one cookbook (that wasn’t online) to follow and draw from, it might feel manageable. I loathe following recipes from my phone. Technology and food don’t somatically go together for me. Chris often takes over and returns from Costco and with large quantities of pre-made burritos and spring rolls and fig newton things and so ensues a kind of judgmental mother energy in me that I don’t like, especially given the irony that I routinely add Salt ‘n Vinegar potato chips to our weekly life. I stand over him in the kitchen and peer down at those pre-made foods like they are going to hurt my children. I say nothing out loud but the energy is thick. None of this is fair to anyone. He looks at me like he looked at me when he would say, “Let me take the baby so you can rest” and I would say, “No.”

I give in more and more.

I give up more and more.

That’s both a good sign of loosening control and a sign of too much coming at me, at all of us. Without a family to tend, I would probably only eat cheese and crackers and salad for the rest of my life.

It’s a feast-or-famine wiring in me.

It’s a full-time working entrepreneur + mother reality.

It’s… not as dire as it sounds.

It is, though, a little unpredictable. In late winter, zooming from school pick up to muck and feed at the horse barn, I had forgotten an after-school snack for Eula and stopped at a gas station.

“We’re getting food here?” she asked.

“Yes, you know that gas stations have food,” I responded brass tax and grabbed a large Snickers bar. Her eyebrows shot up: “I’m confused. You never buy this stuff.” Just eat it, it’ll be delicious. We’ll both have some. I’m not anti-candy. I don’t restrict any food for my kids, but they do know how I feel about balance; they know what a whole food is; they are so tired of being told to drink water and eat protein.

So, what do I like to cook?

I made chicken noodle soup a few weeks ago.

I make a delicious green salad that involves many textures of green with some pop of purple radish and toasted sesame seeds.

I almost always have an instant pot of Ranch Gordo beans warm and ready.

I love a bright magenta beet risotto.

Bison tacos are a staple.

I like the idea of a hearty chili but don’t love that amount of tomatoes.

I prefer simplicity, as in I’m not inspired to make a 8-layer lasagna.

I don’t follow any special recipes but would like to.

AND, I am being called in by my own daughters. They are telling me they want to learn how to cook this and cook that. Eula wants to make her own homemade yogurt. Bo is obsessed with making her own fried duck egg (her body doesn’t love chicken eggs it seems) every morning and sautéing tiny mushrooms in butter for dinner. Now, I get to send myself a signal of safety that IT IS OKAY TO PRIORITIZE FOOD AND COOKING OVER OTHER THINGS. It doesn’t have to be squeezed in. I can make good on my fantasy of spending 2-3 hours meal prepping every week. Sometimes it feels like money and time are stopping me. Nothing and no one is stopping me. I am stopping me. I know better. Is there anything more important that making food with loved ones? No, but damn I have to undo the programming, the urgency, the “these other things must get done so that we can live,” while also being gentle with myself.

The modern day juggle is real.

But I’m more interested in my choice places.

Check out THIS BOOK. Lisa is an incredible human. I’ve overlapped with her in different scenarios and gave her cookbook to all the members of my family and some friends. Stunning. Inspiring. Work of art, truly. I cried reading some of the women’s accounts. All the right ingredients in a book.

Order it here or at your local bookstore. (Bye forever Amazon, if you haven’t already made that shift, the time has never been better).

What do YOU like to cook and eat?

Onward, upward into the astral plane and downward into the earthen places,