Parents Need To Eat, Too — Right?
So, we all know that once you have a new baby in the house everything falls apart — your cleanliness standards, your ability to read grown-up books for more than a pages, your capacity to stay up past 10 pm (with the caveat that you’re often up after midnight, attending to the wee one). But one of the saddest losses that can come along with new parenthood is your pre-baby passion for cooking good food. And for a lot of us, once the babe gets older it doesn’t get much better: meals consist of mac-and-cheese and applesauce, no matter how many times we resolve to diversify.
Enter Debbie Koenig. A Brooklyn mom and freelance food writer, Koenig has started teaching mom-and-kid-friendly cooking classes in her own Williamsburg kitchen, and documenting the results (and advice) on her blog, Words to Eat By.
The cooking series, titled Parents Need to Eat Too, has included Hail Mary Pasta and Whaddya Got Fried Rice, both featuring free-form recipes based on, well, whatever you’ve got in your kitchen. Another early post laid out just what that ought to be, in an incredibly helpful tour of Koenig’s own pantry and refrigerator staples.
Not all of us live in Brooklyn, of course (a sad realization I have every time I climb into a cab taking me to the shuttle home to Boston!), but even if you can’t take her cooking class, blogs like this help remind us that we’re not alone — and that even the tiredest, most energy-deprived mom can climb back out of the culinary basement into a place more sunny, well-lit, and nourishing.
More by this author:
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Hell yes. I’ll have to check this out. I used to be such a good cook, and sometimes I still am….but chicken sausage and steamed broccoli is so easy and relatively good and healthy. Sigh.
hear, hear!
Hey, thanks for the shout-out! Cooking with a baby–or a toddler, for that matter–sure ain’t easy, but it *is* doable.