Everything I Made for Dinner (March 2025)

Circling HomeWork #27

As you may recall, I identify as a bad cook. This is, for me, a casting off of both domestic performance (my mom is a very good cook) and also general young-high-achiever-syndrome (I am a Smart Type Of Person Who Is Good At Things!). I respond poorly to failing or falling short at things that have consequences (my paying job, for instance) but I love being bad at things that have no consequences. I cook mediocre dinners, and I am free.

My current process for meal-planning is this: the first weekend of the month, I make a list of dinners I can prepare off the top of my head without a recipe. I do not like following recipes! I use my brain for other things. There are usually around twenty meals — a few with pasta, a few Tex-Mex, a few soup-type things, some kind of stir-fry, some kind of sandwiches, some kind of sheet-pan meal, a few “stuff in a bowl with rice.” I also plan the inclusion of meals that hardly count as cooking. I will write down “frozen pizza + broccoli” and check it off in due course. I write down “kid dinner” which means boxed macaroni and cheese, frozen peas, and hot dogs. I write down “freezer soup” if I have saved some from a prior batch, and then one day I will take it out of the freezer and it will become dinner. It eases my rut-making mind to know that even if my rotation of dinners is limited, I don’t repeat more than once a month. Some of these recur almost every month; some less frequently. Some foods, I tire of and allow to drop off the list entirely.

Then, I do a “big” grocery shop. All the stores. All the money. It’s a wild goose chase to the ends of the earth and I still come home and remember something I forgot. I’ll go back to the store another day.

Then, all month long, I check dinners off my list. In March, we ate the following (not in order of eating, just in order of my brain dump.