An Ever Lasting Meal?

I adore food, have been meaning to get more strategic about menu planning, and harbor hopes of taking (read: affording) a 6 month maternity leave. Menu planning is a fun & practical place for me to start cutting back on expenses in preparation for my upcoming role as mom.

Just recently I was referred to this cookbook by Tamar Adler:
An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy & Grace.

Source: From Scratch Club

It isn't my normal style of cookbook - I usually go hook, line, & sinker for the usual kind that offer neatly packaged & organized recipes, promising a simple (& often healthy or easy) solution to the usual menu planning challenges.  I'm also hooked on a certain degree of convenience. Don't get me wrong - I don't go crazy with the processed foods - but I do tend to buy canned beans instead of dry, and that sort of thing. I've also been making more of an effort to buy more local &/or organic produce (especially the dirty dozen), buy less canned goods in general (especially tomatoes - I get Pomi brand in a box), etc. - especially since getting pregnant.

I've never tried to make my own yogurt, sterilize jars for jam, or bake bread. In fact, I've avoided the whole genre of baking so as to steer clear of the temptation to expose myself to any more sweets than I already am on any given day (especially at work). I also haven't been a frequent cooker of the whole chicken/fish/etc., making my own chicken stock, or using up a lot of those extra bits of a carcass or vegetable to save money. When I first saw Tamar Adler's book, I wasn't at all sure it was for me.
Then I started reading the preview on Amazon.
Yes, she talks about using up all the bits of your previous meals and making your own chicken stock, but she's gentle and pretty darn convincing about it. Or maybe I'm just ready to hear what she has to say. Either way, I found myself intrigued enough to download the kindle book and start plotting ways to incorporate her ideas into this coming week's meals.
One thing she talks about in particular is always (or often) starting with a pot of boiling water - that the basic pot of water is a classic method that tends to be underplayed by the cooking industry, with its impetus to sell lots of other cooking tools & paraphernalia. What I love about this is her appeal to my desire to have meals dovetail into one another more easily, so as to maximize the investment of time, effort, & money I put into my family's meals. She's a fan of starting with that pot of water, adding odds & ends from your fridge & recent meals, even bits like rinds, bones, & the normally discarded odds & ends of one's produce.
For instance: boil one or more veggies (preferably those that are grown in the same season), mash them, and use them as the base for a pasta sauce. Use the same pot to boil the water. Stuff like that, but she puts it in such a way that a relative convenience-fiend like myself isn't put off the way I was when my elders admonished me when I was younger to be more thrifty.
So between this and next week, I'm inspired to apply her ideas to:

• Ground Turkey
• After a cooking mishap last week & a bit of a strike on this favorite stand-by of hubby's during pregnancy, I promised him I'd make something with it this week. 
• At this moment I'm thinking I'll make chili + rice or pasta, and then turn the leftovers into a casserole later in the week. Maybe I'll even make extra so I can make other meals that don't have to dovetail on all the same ingredients in the chili.
• Chicken in a Pot
• I'm thinking I'll make a whole chicken in a big pot with veggies, and figure there are a variety of things I can do with those leftovers:
  
• Chicken stir fry
• Chicken stock & soup
• Chicken tacos
• Chicken chili
• Chicken Tandoori
• And more!

Here's hoping this leads to a more streamlined way of cooking healthy, relatively easy meals with a nice balance between regular go-to meals and variety!

Mommy Blog or Bust!

Hi, and welcome!

Upon finding out I was pregnant at about 5 or 6 weeks gestation, I initially set up this blog. Then? I found that wonderful thing called the "Due Date Club" via several web sites & apps. I also discovered first trimester exhaustion, and decided those Due Date Clubs were all I had the energy for.

I'm due February 18, 2013 and currently 17 weeks. I like to say that the 2nd trimester is my favorite, because "everyone knows and I can still sleep." Of course, I'm hoping I'll still be able to sleep during the 3rd trimester, but don't know for sure what to expect when my belly gets bigger.

I'm also going to be a FTM or, what they call a First Time Mom.

I'm 35 and this is all new to me. While we got pregnant on purpose, it was a long journey for me to get to where I felt ready. I didn't grow up knowing I wanted to be a mom, cooing along at other people's baby pictures, or coveting nursery decor. I had a mom who scarred me with her story of how horribly painful my birth was and spent most of my adult life trying not to get pregnant.

Source: Unknown

While I haven't always known if I wanted to be a mom, I have always felt that if or when I took the plunge - I'd be all in. And it's true. My BFP came with none of the horror I'd so long imagined and plenty of the joy. I still have plenty of research when it comes to certain pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting issues but I feel pretty comfortable in my overall philosophy. I'm pro attachment theory (as in the research theory; I'm also interested in general premise of the more popular "attachment parenting" approach), I'm semi-crunchy with a side of "doula AND epidural, please!" and believe that while I'll surely make plenty of mistakes and feel pretty utterly inadequate many times, I'll generally be a damn good mom. More so with the emotional stuff than the having my practical shite together stuff, but still.

I have long wanted entrance into the world of Mommy Blogs - they seem to make personal blogging seem so much more legit. Now, if I can only find time to maintain this blog once the baby arrives.

Right now, I'm thinking of the more timely impetus for my getting this blog going: food. I've been spending too much money on it and menu planning seems to be one tangible and fun area to start cutting back on more regularly.

So here's to mommy blogging, menu planning, and maitri. If you're wondering what maitri is, it's a Buddhist word for loving-kindness, directed toward self and others. It's something I'd really like to embody and model for my child.