I really pride myself on my ability to solve all kinds of problems. I’m talking the kind I solve for my clients at work (i.e. “This horrible thing is about to break in the news, what do I do?”) and the more tangible kind around the house (i.e. how to maximize space above my cabinets with custom home-built bookshelves). I draw the line at electric work but light plumbing has always been fair game. However, this weekend I came to terms with the limitations of my home improvement abilities.
It’s been a whirlwind few weeks at work, with travel to such exotic locales as Des Moines and Dallas and a couple of nights of next to no sleep. Having started my career as an investment banking analyst, a role notorious for its neverending high pressure and many sleepless nights, it’s hard for me to imagine now how I did that for so many years. Maybe it’s part of getting older, or maybe I burned out a little too hard those first few years, but nowadays I need a lot of sleep. A few all-nighters will mess me up in a way that takes me a week to recover from.
My cooking game has really taken a nosedive the past few weeks. The number of things I’m juggling – a new role at work, relationships, traveling, a seemingly never-ending to-do list that for some reason doesn’t involve standing by the stove – keeps growing, but the number of hours in a day or week hasn’t changed. I’ve still managed to get out a few projects, but the area that’s suffered the most is the weeknight dinner (also the workday lunch, but this was always the more ambitious of the two). I’ve found myself way too often resorting to ordering dinner and subsequently getting mad at myself for eating way too many Thai noodles.
I was recently having a conversation with my family about how difficult it must be as a parent to have kids who are picky eaters. I’m clearly not a parent (yet), but I could see myself taking a pretty hard line on this, and I guess I do believe that if you do not give a child a choice about what’s going into their mouths, then they will eat things because they’re going to be hungry otherwise. But I also remember reading an article somewhere in which a chef was lamenting that despite her best efforts and utter embarrassment, she had a child who would basically only eat chicken fingers. So I really don’t know what the right answer is. What I do know is that I wasn’t given a choice growing up, and as a young weirdo, my favorite food, for a time in elementary school, was salad.
© 2024 The Kitchen Chronicles
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑