Wherein I ponder (*shudder*) "meal planning"


One of the reasons I like to travel, aside from all the relaxing and adventuring, is the chance to reevaluate my life at home. I find that the perfect formula for quality self-reflection is geographical distance + routine change + not having to clean my house.

On our recent family trip to Traverse City, while I wasn't busy chasing Bea or trying to convince her that stagnant, bug-infested pool water is not awesome for drinking, I did some thinking about life-stuff I want to change. First, I realized I need to get out of the house more to work on my dissertation. I also decided I need some new challenges on my horizon that don't involve academia or baby. As soon as we got home, I signed up for a 10k and a class. (In my next post, maybe I'll talk about my experience so far training for my first run. As for the class--well, it has some tangential ties to my research, but it's mostly just for me; the idea of studying a new language sets my nerd heart aflutter.)

I also thought about how I need to do more scheduled activities with Bea. Following her around the house while she opens cupboards and sticks her foot in the cat's dish fills me with desperation and ennui; that really had to change. Since returning from the trip, I've taken out my art supplies and we've made some pictures together. It's wonderful. It's something we can do together that we both genuinely enjoy. Granted, she always wants to draw with three pencils jammed in each hand, which is annoying, but really, the child's 15 months old, so I can't get too worked up about it.

                                   Bea scribbles, and I fill in the occasional triangle until she wrenches the pencil out of my hand.

Finally, I thought about the eternal, vexing question of What to do for Dinner. With a small kitchen, a small child, and very small windows in which to cook, I have to be deliberate about choosing and shopping for meals. Justin works late, at least for now, so the task of dinner falls mostly to me. Granted, he takes over some of the cooking on weekends and is always fine with ordering in, but there are usually a few nights a week when I am duty-bound to plan a civilized, decent meal for the three of us. Before Bea was born, this used to be a pleasure (cue music and the corking of wine) but these days it's not always my favorite thing.

So, yeah, meal planning. Meal planning. Meal planning. A bleak phrase. It's so far from my usual strategy of wandering the sample area of the grocery store, popping bits of olive into Bea's mouth, waiting for inspiration to strike. Sometimes inspiration will come, but often it's just in the form of a lame rationalization: c'mon, toast and eggs is a great dinner! Hey, what's wrong with cheese and a baguette for dinner? It's romantic, in an impoverished kind of way! Or, what if I make a ton of guacamole-- like six avocados' worth? That totally counts, right?

I've lately been calling this condition Dinner Block. And just as blocked writers need tricks for clearing their cognitive hurdles, I need a system. For no particular reason, I decided that Mondays would be a grain-based dish (rice, quinoa, etc.), Tuesdays would be pasta, and Wednesdays salad. Thursday-Sunday would be kept open for going out to eat, ordering in, making dinner-sized sundaes, or using the new oyster knife Justin got me for my birthday to have an oyster party. Monday-Wednesday are, hands down, the toughest nights for me, so those nights need a system.

So, okay, so grain, pasta, salad. GPS.

After we got back from vacation, I launched in immediately. The week started with a Sunday trip to the farmer's market. My usual farmer's market M.O. is to wander around, surveying the produce and just buying what looks good. But this time, before we left, I sat on the floor for a good 20 minutes, waist deep in a nest of cookbooks, thumbing around for recipes to fit into the GPS slots.

And you know what? It was so, so fun. Before long, I'd filled a few notebook pages with ideas, and as I built up a collection of recipes my GPS categories suddenly got more flexible and interesting. Inventing and justifying culinary taxonomies is a fun thing if you haven't tried it. (What? You haven't tried it?) Are Mark Bittman's lettuce and rice noodle-stuffed spring rolls a salad, a pasta, or a grain? Couscous is a pasta, right? Is tuna salad a salad? For a real trip, take a look at the salad section of Nourishing Traditions. The crowning jewel? "Meat Salad."

The fun continued at the market, where I tweaked the week's dishes to reflect what I found. Monday's grain recipe was still kind of up in the air (something with farro?), but I'd settled on Tuesday's pasta of fresh tuna, radishes, and celery. When I didn't see any celery, I snapped up some kohlrabi instead, just because it looked good and crunchy. Wednesday's menu was a roasted corn salad with tomatoes and feta, so I grabbed an armload of unshucked corn, which Bea and I had a blast peeling a day or two later. I also happened to notice a bunch of mint that would be delicious in the corn salad, so into the basket it went.

So far--and it's just been a couple weeks--the creative constraints have made for some fresh, seasonal meals. While we're not eating anything radically different, I feel more relaxed. It's like I've outsourced the dinner decision-making to my more uptight self so I can turn my attention to something else. I also like to think that since I master-minded this little system, I can dump it at will and go get calzones. Calzones are a grain, alright?

What does each noun mean?

Here's Ray Bradbury on writing in a conversation with Paris Review. His advice reminds me of Lynda Barry's exercises in What It Is. I wonder if Barry knew the interview or if the two writers were just thinking along on the same, marvelous cosmic wave length.

"Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are."


I really like this--the clarity and practicality. There's something even kind of American in the commitment to things, stuff, nouns as the starting point for a task so elusive and intangible as writing. Some day soon I'm going to clear a few days from my schedule and actually write creatively the way I used to do in college (happy non-academic moments wedged in between paper-writing and exam studying--and I thought I was oh-so-busy then. Ha!).

In Joshua Foer’s nifty new book about the art of memory, Moonwalking with Einstein, he says that memorizing connects us to an oral tradition in which the culture’s most valuable ideas weren’t written down but memorized. One of the main qualities of a good memorizer is the ability to look to the past. Surprise, surprise: Americans are notoriously poor at committing stuff to memory because we’re so focused on the future.

I’ll cop to being a stereotypical American in this respect. While I don’t think I’m an awful memorizer (want a Robert Frost poem, anyone? No?), I have been future-oriented all of my life—or at least since around 13 or 14 when I discovered the cause-and-effect satisfaction of earning good grades and managing my weight.

I sometimes think about what I’ve lost in this drive toward the future. Whole potential experiences, thoughts, and features of my personality have probably been lost, sink-hole-like. Some people are haunted by things they never accomplished. I’m haunted by time I didn’t waste when I should have.

This all to say that it has been challenging adjusting to having a baby. The loss of sleep and freedom are rough (this is a lot easier now that she’s almost a year), but I’m still a little perplexed by this new reality in which my own future is not only irrelevant but is actually an impediment to the process.

I’ll be sitting on the floor watching Bea turn a small object over in her fat little hands, or I’ll be dragging her out of the kitchen for the twentieth time, explaining that we can’t, however much we’d like to, stick our hand, wrist-deep, in cat food. While all this is happening in real time, I’ll feel like I’m being slowly erased, like small particles of me are being spun out into the air, diffused and gone. The experience is at once sweet, serene, and also kind of scary.

For the record, I hate the psycho-pop mandate to Be in the Now. Now makes no sense. Now is the stuff of nostalgia, an invention. There’s a stink diaper to be changed, and that’s not a now I want to live in.

Besides, everything I’m doing for Bea now is designed to move her into the future. I have to make sure she is fed and loved today so can exist tomorrow and the next day and on into the future, happy and undamaged. Just to prove what a little speed racer she is, her face keeps changing. She’s looking older. She keeps getting taller. The calendar keeps bossily informing me of her tumble routine into the future. I need to help her get there. It’s kind of like the way nature takes what it needs from the mother’s body and gives it to the fetus (traces of depletion in postpartum bones and teeth and hair). The future needs me less than it needs her. No surprise there.

So I help her move forward. I’m fine with that. I just need to figure out where that puts me in the meantime. I suppose it puts me in the meantime. Whatever that means.