A Chic Paris Lockdown – Day 20 – Dinner as the Main Event
Fiona Ferris titled Day 19 “Be Your Own Chef” in her book, 30 Chic Days. In this chapter, Fiona writes about how to take the stressful decision making out of mealtimes. Many of us can relate to her comment that it’s not actually preparing a meal that is so exhausting, it’s the actual deciding about what to prepare. She shares her approach to make mealtime easier: keep a “family favorites menu.” Just like restaurants list what dishes are available, we can keep a list of our favorite meals (and/or dishes) conveniently located in the kitchen. Whenever we are stuck trying to think of what to make, we can pull out our “menu” for ideas.
My husband and I adopted this idea when I first read 30 Chic Days. We started out by keeping a thin notebook with just a list of meals that we like. Over several years, it has grown into a 1 1/2 inch thick, 3-ring binder filled with recipes of meals that we particularly enjoy. It came with us to Paris and is in weekly use here.
I have added two old-fashioned ideas taken from my mother and my mother-in-law to our dinner approach. We have a weekly meal plan most weeks. (My mother kept a monthly meal plan when I was growing up!) What we added from my husband’s mother is the idea that certain days mean certain meals – Sunday dinner is roast, rice and gravy. Friday is hamburgers on the grill. Wednesday is “weird” food – anything experimental that might catch my eye (and will be regarded with suspicion by the children.) We don’t follow this approach every single week but we do follow it most weeks. The designated meal-days works for us because I pretty much know what should be on the grocery store list at all times. The weekly menu works because all decision-making about “what’s for dinner” is done on Sunday afternoon (usually while the roast is simmering) when I make the weekly menu. Any missing ingredients can be added to the grocery list and picked up or delivered on Monday or Tuesday. Living in Paris, we walk to the market street for fresh vegetables, fresh fruit and meats at least every other day. A traditional grocery store run is usually a once a week or twice a week walk (pulling a wheeled cart called a “chariot” in which our purchased supplies like paper towels or canned tuna fish are carried.)
The chief benefit of having a pre-planned weekly menu is that it saves my husband and me from the frustrating question “what’s for dinner?” right at 5pm when we are already tired and hungry and out of energy for decision making (“decision fatigue.”) The next great benefit is that I usually eat healthier and tastier meals. Left to my own devices, my last-minute, rushed choices are rarely elegant or chic! (Potato chips out a bag? Peanut-butter on Ritz crackers? 3-year old Lean Cuisine mystery meal from the darkest corner of the freezer? Eek! That type of meal just leaves me feeling like a fat slug and still hungry!)
One of my real-life chic mentors taught me about “investment cooking.” Just because life gets busy or unexpected events consume our schedule is no reason why we should suffer bad food. (Don’t you love the way she puts it – “suffer bad food?” Here is one chic woman who looks at fast food, chips and anything packaged as a form of suffering. That’s a much better way of looking at those types of food options than thinking of them as “treats!”) On some rainy weekend or cold, miserable Saturday, we can plan to make a huge pot of wonderful spaghetti sauce, boeuf bourguignon (beef stew) or coq au vin (chicken stew). The house smells wonderful all day and you can enjoy whatever you made for dinner. After dinner, put the rest of the enormous pot of whatever in quart-sized freezer bags. Each freezer bag should be full enough to represent a meal. Label the outside of the bag and stack them neatly in the freezer. With the spaghetti, go ahead and make a big pot of pasta and freeze a dinner’s worth of pasta in a freezer bag, too. You can bring the pasta back to life by putting the frozen noodles in a big bowl and pouring boiling water over them. You can do the same if you eat rice with the stew – go ahead and make the rice, put a meal’s worth in a freezer bag, flatten out the bag and store them in a stack near the stew. A quick minute or two in the microwave will heat up the rice. Now, you have 9-10 “emergency” delicious home-made dinners stashed away.
Soup is also a terrific “investment cooking” dish. Again, make an enormous pot and after the soup has cooled, store it in freezer bags or disposable insulated coffee cups (a great way to recycle our take-away Starbucks coffee cup!)
Every other month, you can plan a cozy weekend day at home puttering in the kitchen. All the while you stir up something delicious, you know that this one cooking effort will yield a nice stash of “emergency” meals. All that’s needed is some microwave time and you and your loved ones can enjoy them on those busy, hectic days!
Of course, all this “investment cooking” requires freezer space. In the US, large freezers are common in most households. Here, in Paris, my husband and I were incredibly lucky to find a charming apartment that had a full-sized American refrigerator and freezer. On one of our first weekends here, we purchased a huge heavy pot and made a thick, meaty bolognese suitable for the “emergency” freezer stack.
I like how I see and hear my European friends here in Paris approach dinner. Most of the time, they look at dinner as the high point of the day – not something that is a bothersome inconvenience that we should all really just skip somehow so we could get on to more important things. Dinner is the important thing. Everyone in the family is there. (There is not the everyday after-school sport/activity habit here that I have seen in my own small town in the US.) And meal times last longer. When dining with friends, I remind my children that food would be served slowly and they would be sitting at the table longer than what they were used to.
Life in lockdown means that we eat together every meal of the day instead of just breakfast and dinner. (The children are attending school via the internet.) Our schedule didn’t change all that much for the afternoons because there were no structured after-school activities. There is still homework. We have had to cut down on family outings to the park after school when we would throw frisbees and kick the soccer ball. Often, families from school who lived nearby would join us at the park on Saturday morning for impromptu soccer games or ultimate frisbee. Those activities, of course, are on hold. With the drop in out-of-house activities, there is more time for trying new recipes. Two or more of us are usually in the kitchen together as we are cooking. Clean-up, of course, is not as popular as baking! (Zucchini bread was our experiment this afternoon.)
