Why the Cook Quit or A Modern Jack Sprat Tale

In the past two months that I’ve been blog­ging, I’ve also been read­ing a lot of PF blogs.  I’ve noticed that the gro­cery bill is almost uni­ver­sally the first bud­get cat­e­gory tar­geted by peo­ple want­ing to tighten the bud­get belt.  The Hus­band and I have dis­cussed this obser­va­tion and his take is that in sit­u­a­tions of deep con­sumer debt, the gro­cery bill is one of the very few monthly bills that has any wig­gle room at all.  This has lead to more than one con­ver­sa­tion about our own food con­sump­tion and gro­cery bill.  The con­sen­sus is that we’re both very happy with our cur­rent food con­sump­tion and see no need to make any sig­nif­i­cant changes although we agreed that I could be a lit­tle more con­scious of sales and/or coupons — I have def­i­nitely got­ten a bit lax in those areas.

So, we’re com­fort­able with how much we spend and sat­is­fied with the types and quan­ti­ties of food that comes into the house.  The one area, however, in which I see room for sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment is the num­ber of home-cooked, from-scratch meals I pre­pare in the course of the week.  As much as I hate to admit it, I only cook one or two meals a week.  We always eat din­ner together as a fam­ily but more often than not than not those meals are “smor­gash­board” affairs — each per­son finds and pre­pares their own indi­vid­ual meal choices.

There are two main rea­sons behind our lack of home-cooked meals.  First, my health.  What­ever the rea­sons — whether the lin­ger­ing results of the TIAs or a side-effect of the Fibromyal­gia or the hypothy­roidism — I still strug­gle with a low energy level.  By the time evening rolls around, it’s often every­thing I can do just to sit at the table with my fam­ily and feed myself.  And second, we rep­re­sent a mod­ern twist on the Jack Sprat tale-of-two-conflicting-diets idea.  Except in our case there are two con­flict­ing diets plus a third restricted diet to consider.

I have exten­sive food aller­gies.  I’m aller­gic to all legumes (all beans & peas).  I’m also aller­gic to most oils (I can eat canola and olive oil only).  I’m aller­gic to corn; most nuts; most seeds.  I can’t have any form of soy.  I’m aller­gic to all yeast (baker’s and brewer’s).  And I’m aller­gic to mus­tard.  And mush­rooms (actu­ally, every­thing fer­mented or con­tain­ing fungi).  And those are just the things I can think of off the top of my head.  And we’re not talk­ing about not being able to have a full serv­ing of some­thing; I can’t ingest even the tini­est amount of any of these items.

This means that I can’t have sushi rolled in sesame seeds nor any wasabi nor any­thing that has come in con­tact with soy sauce or wasabi; I can’t eat any solid­i­fied choco­late prod­ucts; I can’t eat any­thing con­tain­ing soup stock nor any­thing labeled as con­tain­ing “spices.”  Almost with­out excep­tion, I can­not eat any­thing pack­aged or pre-prepared.  I once ate one bite of a cookie from Whole Foods.  I’d care­fully checked the ingre­di­ents and con­firmed that the oil used was canola and the rest of the ingre­di­ents were okay.  I got unbear­ably sick.  It turned out that the oil used to grease the pans so the cook­ies wouldn’t stick was some­thing other than canola. 

Eat­ing out is sim­ply not pos­si­ble.  Trav­el­ing is very dif­fi­cult.  At home, in a fully-stocked kitchen, there’s actu­ally quite a bit that I can eat.  But all of my pro­tein has to come from meat.  And here’s where the Jack Sprat thing comes in — The Daugh­ter is a veg­e­tar­ian.   Her diet is almost directly in con­flict with mine.  Add to this diet issue the fact that The Hus­band is sup­posed to restrict his salt, cho­les­terol, and sugar intake.

Cook­ing is often just more has­sle than it’s worth.

But we’re learn­ing how to com­pen­sate.  Some­times I pre­pare meals that the kids and The Hus­band can eat.  Some­times I pre­pare a meal that every­one but The Daugh­ter can eat.  I’d really like to put more thought and effort into build­ing a col­lec­tion of recipes that will meet the needs and tastes of three out of four.  But, for now, most of our meals are smor­gas­board affairs with each per­son fix­ing a sand­wich or some eggs or a bowl of cereal or a que­sadilla or a salad to meet the desires of their own taste buds.

I’m just grate­ful that our bud­get is such that tight­en­ing our gro­cery bill belt isn’t necessary.

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