You Set 'Em Up, I'll Knock 'Em Down

As you can probably imagine, going from the chaos of a professional kitchen to staying at home with a newborn was a big change.

In the kitchen, you're never not doing something. In almost any other job, there is at least some semblance of downtime. A lunch break, poking around on the internet, or just taking a second to make plans for the weekend.

So, while babies are A LOT of work, I had quite a bit of downtime. And that was doubly true before there was any walking or crawling going on.

As I'll probably say over and over again, cooking at home is quite different than cooking in a restaurant. The portions are smaller, the equipment is different, and you don't really want to eat fine dining everynight of the week. But maybe I only say that because I was constantly surrounded by it.

All that is to say, it took me some time to get back into home cooking mode. In the end, my wife and I decided to play to our strengths when it came to our meals at home. Decision maker (her), cook (me).

We started (and still use) a shared Apple Note with the days of the week and what we'll eat on those days. She decides what the meals are, and I cook them. It couldnt be simpler, and I couldnt be happier than to cook without too much thinking.

In a lot of restourants, the moment you're promoted from line cook to sous chef, the amount actual cooking you do decreases dramatically. At that point you're primarily putting out fires, and making sure you have enough staff to cook the food and wash the dishes.

Sure, there's food ordering in the mix, and hopefullly you get to R&D some dishes that make it on the menu. But anytime I get to simply cook, I'm a happy camper.

My wife and I vasilate between using a set formula where say, Monday is a pasta, Tuesday is "Stuff with Rice", Thursday is a soup, etc. And just choosing meals that sound good.

In general, we try to keep it fairly simple during the week, especially now that there are two kids, leaving me outnumbered with prep time being almost non-existant.

Weekend meals can be a bit more involved, and Sunday supper (I don't really call it supper) is for when we want to go all out, or just make some classics.

Here's our menu from last week:

We don't usually do much planning when it comes to lunches. I try to make enough food for dinner so that there is enough for my wife to take to work. And me and the kids really just freestyle with whatever we have on hand.

I'm not really in the habit of snapping pictures of everything that we eat, but I guess that would make this whole process a bit easier and more fun to look at.

The same goes for having recipes that I can include for all of you to try. Meals are usually thrown together solely from past cooking experiences and generel ingredient knowledge. However, I do have an extensive personal and professional recipe library that I'm working to consolidate in order to share with the masses.

Here's what I got from last week. More to come.