Katie Workman - The Mom 100 Cookbook Sampler

There was a bizarre perfume commercial that ran on TV throughout the late seventies and eighties that must have made many women cringe. The ad presented its own view of the liberated woman: She was someone who was not only able to bring home the bacon, but also able to fry it up in a pan, all the while never, never letting her partner forget hes a man. It popped into my mind as I was scraping cheese off the bottom of the toaster oven. And, while the stunning, multi-tasking woman who stars in the ad does make reference to having children (the singing voice-over boasts that she can make the kids breakfast and still be at work at 5 minutes to 9:00) there is simply no evidence of kids at all. This ber-every-woman may be holding a frying pan, but frankly its empty and I think the price sticker is still on it. There are no sticky-fingered children clinging to her shapely legs, pinching each other, getting maple syrup on her brand-new stockings. I dont think her perfume is the solution Im looking for.

Well, happily thats over, those crazy high expectations that a mom can do it all, with only the help of a perfume.

Oh, wait... what? Its not over? We still need to do that whole thing with the bacon and the kids and the work and the man (or at least the kids and the work)? Oh.

May I make a suggestion? Lets stop acting as if life isnt messy and complicated and highly inconvenient at times. Lets not even acknowledge the imagined platonic ideal of the woman who can breastfeed a baby while beating eggs for a souffl and at the same time tally up the P&L spreadsheets for Huge Important Company, Inc. Lets ignore her completely (since shes not real, were not hurting anyones feelings).

One of the commonest denominators in the lives of all moms is the often anxiety-inducing need to feed our families. Like, every day! Really, just completely non-negotiable. And I dont think you need to hear another diatribe about how were not making enough time to be a family at the dinner table, and how packaged foods and take-out are ruining our health, and how hard you have to fight to keep your kids from turning into French frymunching, video gameloving, sugar-addicted zombies. You already know all that. Youre sufficiently concerned. Youre a good mom. Okay, were all on the same page... but now what do we do?

To be a good mom, you do not have to cook every meal, or make everything from scratch, or know the provenance of every morsel of food your children eat. Give yourself a break. This cooking thing should be a little bit fun. Wow, weve really gotten to a point where food has become serious. Were either ankle deep in news about hormones in our meat, or trying to pronounce thiamin mononitrate, or hearing about kids with weight issues, or trying to remember which red dye number is going to kill us fastest, or just looking at the stove at the end of the day like its our arch enemy. We need to figure out how to capture some joy in the kitchen, because guess what? We get to make dinner just about every night! And we can approach this task as though we are being asked to regrout our bathtub nightly, or approach it with a certain amount of joie de vivre. We might as well pick that joie thing, because (as I mentioned possibly twice already) we have to do it anyway.

Also, while there is plenty of good food-oriented television programming and interesting writing about food, there is also a lot that is... well... kind of ridiculous and/or kind of intimidating. Certainly we should all be aware of where our food comes from, and pick up a thing or two about sustainability, eating locally, and the like. But when too much information gets in the way of our getting dinner on the table, its time to tell the food police to take their thesis about the care and propagation of endangered heirloom potatoes and play somewhere else. You, my friend... you have dinner to make.

No one is enchanted by people who say, My kids are such wonderful eaters, they eat everything. The only responses are, Wow! Good for you, and good for them! or Liar, liar, pants on fire. Some kids eat a lot of different foods, and some dont. I do feel glad/lucky that my own kids are pretty darn good eaters. However, they dont eat everything. Who eats everything? And why does eating everything make you such a spectacular human being?

If you have kids who do eat pretty much everything, then you are one lucky duck. But a gentle reminderthis information isnt as enthralling to others as it is to you. If it secretly makes you feel better, you can hold your head a little higher at the PTA meeting and think to yourself, I see you over there, Claire, bragging about your little Donny, and how well he did at the chess tournament. Well, good for you, miss missy; my Brian eats Brussels sprouts. Checkmate, baby. And you can rest assured that your mother-in-law is sharing the good news with her mah-jongg friends.

Cooking for kids is not always the most gratifying experience, Im the first to admit. And when someone Id like to impress, just a little bit, is sitting at the table, one of my kids usually picks that moment to say, Ew, Mom are those capers?! Im not eating that. To which I usually respond, smiling with gently clenched teeth and stiff cheeks, Honey, you ate that last month, and you loved it. Really, you loved it. You asked for seconds. No big deal, its just so funny that you dont remember! Its so FUNNY!

And as the old song goes (yes, Kenny Rogers) You got to know when to walk away, know when to run. On some family trips to a certain kind of destination, there are chicken nuggets as far as the eye can see, and you have to give in to the moment, Zen nuggetlike. Serenity now.

1. Sorry for the all caps but DO NOT OFFER YOUR KID SOMETHING TO TRY WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY SAYING, I DONT THINK YOURE GOING TO LIKE THIS. We all catch ourselves doing this occasionally, and realize, just after the words have escaped and its too late, Oops. Now what are the odds that your child will turn around and say, No, Mom, youre wrong; this 8-bean soup is fantastic!