How to solve your “What’s for dinner?” problem
I was out for dinner with my girlfriends recently and we got onto this, and every single one of us agreed we want more time and a little more fun in the kitchen. Like, we all actually like cooking! It's everything leading up to it that is so un-fun... the deciding, the curating of the grocery list, remembering what's in the fridge, figuring out who's home on what night.
And then it's 5:30 and somebody asks "what's for dinner?" and you can feel your whole body sigh.
My mom had dinner on the table at 6
I was raised by a stay-at-home mom, of four girls no less, and she had dinner on the table at 6:00 every night. She genuinely enjoyed that, and I love that for her. My version of motherhood looks really different, and I'm so grateful for that too, and at the same time something has gotta give somewhere because we can't buy more time. There just isn't any more time to get.
"We don't have chicken, but how important is that really?"
Here's my confession. When I'm missing an ingredient, I will still cook the recipe without it, even if it's the main one... "well, we don't have chicken, but how important is that really?" That's problematic, I know! But it's such a good example of where the stress actually lives for me, which is in the planning and the list and the Tuesday-night realization, way more than in the chopping and the stirring.
Why are we asking the little robots for permission?
I'm so guilty of this one. I put the school I drive to every single day to pick up my kids into Google Maps, every single time. What if one day I just didn't, and maybe it took two minutes longer? I think about that with dinner too... we've gotten so used to asking our phones for the quickest way and the best way that it feels almost radical to just open up a cookbook, flip to a page and make the thing.
Simplify everything that comes before the cooking
So that's where I've landed: let the dinner itself be yours, and simplify everything that comes before the cooking. For me that's online grocery shopping, heck yeah, and I actually spend way less money because I'm not wandering the aisles. My husband says I would join a cult if I was asked, especially if there's a founder doing a sampling ("give me 12!"), so keeping me out of the store is honestly a financial strategy. A plan helps too, ideally one that goes with the season, because I don't want a stew in the summer.
Share the list
Delegating dinner can feel like soooo much more work. By the time you've explained what to make, where the pan is and what to pick up, you might as well do it yourself! But when the plan and the list already exist, handing it off gets a lot easier, and my husband is about to start cooking his way through a cookbook, darn straight. We've been in gradual entry and everything's gone out the window over here, so believe me, I'm saying this to myself as much as to you.
Want more of this?
I sat down IRL in Kelowna with Tori Wesszer, registered dietitian, founder of Fraîche and author of the brand-new cookbook Fraiche and Simple. I hit pre-order before I even knew what was in it, opened it up to eight weeks of seasonal meal plans and was like, mic drop, she's done it. We get into why "what's for dinner?" feels so heavy for women, what a dietitian really thinks about packaged snacks and takeout pizza night, whether AI belongs in your kitchen, and how Tori went from 16 years in a great job to building something of her own (starting with a jar of honey).
