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Time for Dinner
BY ELAINE ROOKER JACK
No matter what else she’s
responsible for at work or
at home, odds are the
responsibility for feeding others f
alls to the woman of the house.
PHOTOS BY EWA
WOJTKOWSKA
THE CARTOON CHILD ASKS
THE CARTOON MOTHER, “
What’s for dinner?” The mother
flies into a diatribe that begins
"I'm cooking as fast as I can” and
ends with a threat to scream if
the phone rings one more time.
In the final panel the younger
cartoon child asks his sister,
“What’s for dinner,” and she
responds, “Chicken ‘n stress.”
It’s a cartoon called Baby Blues
(Kirkman and Scott) but it’s a reality
in many homes, many nights a week. No matter what else she’s responsible for at work
or at home, odds are the responsibility for feeding others falls to the woman of the
house. It’s a multi-faceted responsibility: planning, shopping, cooking and serving. And
those three little words, “What’s for dinner,” never fail to get a reaction, from a deep
groan to a big sigh to a tired laugh.
A Secret Weapon
Dawn McCubbin stays home with sons Connor (6), Walker (3), and Jack (18 months).
When she makes a menu plan and goes shopping on Sunday or Monday, it makes her
whole week of cooking easier, although going to the grocery with three little boys in tow
is a challenge. “I try to go on preschool days, but sometimes I have to take all three,”
McCubbin says. “That’s just life.”
The boys don’t help much with meals, but McCubbin is looking forward to the day when
they can help and not just create more work. “I’d like to teach them how to cook; I don’t
want them to be inept in the kitchen.”
Her biggest challenge is expanding her family’s culinary horizons. “I’m not a fruit and
vegetable and salad person,” she says, “But I don’t want my boys to grow up that way.”
It’s important to McCubbin to have the whole family sit down for the evening meal, and
she doesn’t make separate entrees for the kids. “If they don’t like it, fine, they can have
yogurt. But if they don’t try it they can’t ask for snacks five minutes after supper.”
McCubbin recently tried preparing meals at Entree Vous, a business that provides the
recipes and ingredients and customers assemble a meal to take home and heat and
serve. “We’re kind of plain-Jane eaters,” says McCubbin. “It was too fancy for us. Of
course, fish is adventuresome for us. I made three meals for $60. It might be a help for
someone looking to be creative, but I don’t see myself going back there.”
McCubbin’s secret weapon is her slow cooker. With it she makes chili, italian roast beef,
and chicken parmesan. When her meal plan falls through, McCubbin calls her husband
and asks him to stop at Kroger on the way home. “He usually says, ‘Let’s just go out,’”
says McCubbin, which they do about once a week. They usually choose Mexican food
because the boys like it and Mom can order a margarita. McCubbin recently subscribed
to Every Day With Rachael Ray, lured by the promise of meals in 30 minutes, hoping to
add to her cooking repertoire. “I’m not the kind of person who can take an onion and
some wine and make a meal. I’m a recipe gal.”
Dinner on the Go
When I ask Jennifer Crews what’s for dinner, she laughs. Jennifer teaches reading at
JCPS’s Moore Traditional School. After working with 6th-8th graders all day, she comes
home to four children. Sean, 17, is into Boy Scouts, theatre, and he plays in two bands.
Sixteen-year-old Jimmy is in ROTC Color Guard and Boy Scouts. Heather, 11, competes
as a member of the US Gymnastics Association, and 7-year-old Allen is a Cub Scout and
competes in “whatever sport is in season.”
Crews aims for a family meal together but says there’s usually someone missing or
grabbing food and heading out the door. “How did women do it before?” she muses. “I
hear people say, ‘We had a set time for meals and you had to be home.’ I admire that.
But how did they do it?” Crews says she doesn’t mind cooking. She makes spaghetti,
hamburgers, chicken breasts and Mexican style entrees (“it’s the same stuff; it’s just in
different wrappers”). Her frustrations come from planning and cleaning up, although her
kids help by setting the table and doing dishes.
Sometimes it’s hard to cook for so many different tastes. “Jimmy and Sean don’t care for
soup, and Allen doesn’t like spaghetti.” And husband Bill is trying to lose weight by eating
less at suppertime. Usually Crews does her planning on the car-ride home from work,
sometimes stopping at the grocery for a rotisserie chicken. When all else fails there’s
“breakfast for supper” or Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, which they all love. “One night I
was fixing mac and cheese, and the water was boiling and we were out of milk,” Crews
remembers. “How can we be out of milk? I looked for cream, but I didn’t have that either.
So I made it without the milk. I just added a little more butter. It didn’t taste bad.”
There is one indispensable item in Crews’ pantry. She once made an urgent trip to the
grocery for ketchup before her family would come to the table. “There has to be
ketchup!”
Let Hubby Do It
Sharon Dekker has a deal many women would envy: after work some nights, she rides
her horse for an hour while her husband Michael cooks!
When Sharon started dating Michael in college, she had no idea her future husband
would embrace cooking as a hobby. “He lived on his own for three years,” Sharon
remembers. “He had to either learn to cook or eat out all the time.”
Now Michael cooks more than half the time, and he’s the one who takes the initiative on
planning and cooking. “He usually has some idea what he wants to make that week, and I
have some ideas. We shop together. It’s a compromise, because we both hate to shop.”
Most weekends Michael and Sharon cook up two or three meals together and coast on
them through the week. Michael’s specialties are pizzas and pastas. Their fall-back
meals include canned soup and sandwiches, although they often have homemade soup
put by in the freezer. They like to get sushi from the Kroger deli, and they use the slow
cooker often on weekends.
Usually mealtime is just Sharon and Michael, although for six months Sharon’s 16-year-
old niece lived with them. “We’d cook dinner and she’d look at it and say, “I’ll just have a
corndog.” Their frustrations with food generally come during weeks when they’re so
rushed at the end of the day that they don’t feel like following their plan. “Then on Friday
we’ve only made two dishes and we have all this food we either have to cook right away
or it gets wasted.”
Candlelit Suppers
When Robbie Battoe’s sons were at home, mealtime was synonymous with family time.
Now that her boys are grown and gone, mealtime is still family time even though there
are only two at the table. These days Battoe cooks for herself and her husband of 34
years, Bob.
Robbie Battoe is minister of congregational care at St. John UMC in Prospect. After long
hours nurturing others, she comes home and fixes food. Many nights she cooks the
whole meal on the grill: marinated chicken breasts, fresh vegetables, and fresh bread in
a skillet with olive oil. She tosses a salad and serves the meal, with candlelight, on the
patio.
Recently Battoe made what she calls a “healthy conversion.” She was concerned about
health issues, particularly in light of family history and the incidence of diabetes in the
aging general population. She found her knees aching and her blood sugar creeping up
and vowed to lose weight — she lost 40 pounds.
Battoe had always been a health-conscious cook, but now she says, “The junk food is
gone.” She no longer uses canned vegetables, her casserole days are over, and she
serves no white rice, white flour, or white bread.
She recalls when her older son was five he “shared” at school that his mother’s favorite
thing to do was “lay in the bathtub and read cookbooks.” “I did some bizarre cooking,”
Battoe admits with a laugh. “Home-made crackers. I made my own yogurt.” She baked
sourdough bread from a starter she kept alive for seven years, moving it with her from
state to state.
She and the boys used to research different cultures and cuisines and cook foods from
other countries. “We had fun times cooking in the kitchen,” says Battoe. “Some of our
greatest talks, too. I’d say ‘Come chop some celery,’ and I’d learn about the latest girl.”
When her sons were teenagers and active in sports, Battoe specialized in “volume
cooking,” making huge quantities of food to freeze. Her Monday meatloaf would reappear
as the meat in tacos, then evolve into chili on Friday. On practice nights she often made
stir-fry. But Battoe carefully guarded mealtimes. “The TV was never on, and we always
sat down as a family. If someone was late, we waited for that person.” Battoe made sure
her sons knew how to cook, and “both are very adequate cooks today.”
Battoe’s least favorite part of the process is grocery shopping. Shopping was her “time
away” if Bob could stay with the young boys. These days Battoe and her husband treat
the errand as a “partner thing.” They get coffee and take their time in the store, laughing
and visiting with friends. She always kept an on-going list on the fridge for the family to
add to when they used the last of something. “Hugs for Bob” has appeared on the list
under “cheerios.”
“You go through phases,” says Battoe. “When you’re a newlywed you’re cooking to
please. Then you’re throwing it together. But now, after 34 years, food is not the focus.
Being together is the focus.
“I tried to give [cooking] my best, put some effort into it, give it some thought. When I did,
I knew what I fixed was good for them, and I could say, ‘I’ve been a good Mom today.’”•
Three of every four American adults are eating dinner at home, but preparing it from
scratch is now the choice of only one-in-three, and restaurant take-out has overtaken sit-
down dining.
• In 2005, the average American ate 80 meals at restaurants and 57 take-home meals.
• Forty-two percent of adults are purchasing supermarket take-out each month.
Source: Food Technology magazineThe Crock-Pot® may seem like a relic from
an avocado-appliance, 8-track-tape-playing world. But Rival® reports selling over 100
million slow cookers since their debut in 1970. And this humble appliance is used —
often — by everyone interviewed for this article.
ELAINE JACK lives in Goshen and makes a weekly menu plan from two seasonal lists of
family-approved recipes.
BY ELAINE ROOKER JACK
No matter what else she’s
responsible for at work or
at home, odds are the
responsibility for feeding others f
alls to the woman of the house.
PHOTOS BY EWA
WOJTKOWSKA
THE CARTOON CHILD ASKS
THE CARTOON MOTHER, “
What’s for dinner?” The mother
flies into a diatribe that begins
"I'm cooking as fast as I can” and
ends with a threat to scream if
the phone rings one more time.
In the final panel the younger
cartoon child asks his sister,
“What’s for dinner,” and she
responds, “Chicken ‘n stress.”
It’s a cartoon called Baby Blues
(Kirkman and Scott) but it’s a reality
in many homes, many nights a week. No matter what else she’s responsible for at work
or at home, odds are the responsibility for feeding others falls to the woman of the
house. It’s a multi-faceted responsibility: planning, shopping, cooking and serving. And
those three little words, “What’s for dinner,” never fail to get a reaction, from a deep
groan to a big sigh to a tired laugh.
A Secret Weapon
Dawn McCubbin stays home with sons Connor (6), Walker (3), and Jack (18 months).
When she makes a menu plan and goes shopping on Sunday or Monday, it makes her
whole week of cooking easier, although going to the grocery with three little boys in tow
is a challenge. “I try to go on preschool days, but sometimes I have to take all three,”
McCubbin says. “That’s just life.”
The boys don’t help much with meals, but McCubbin is looking forward to the day when
they can help and not just create more work. “I’d like to teach them how to cook; I don’t
want them to be inept in the kitchen.”
Her biggest challenge is expanding her family’s culinary horizons. “I’m not a fruit and
vegetable and salad person,” she says, “But I don’t want my boys to grow up that way.”
It’s important to McCubbin to have the whole family sit down for the evening meal, and
she doesn’t make separate entrees for the kids. “If they don’t like it, fine, they can have
yogurt. But if they don’t try it they can’t ask for snacks five minutes after supper.”
McCubbin recently tried preparing meals at Entree Vous, a business that provides the
recipes and ingredients and customers assemble a meal to take home and heat and
serve. “We’re kind of plain-Jane eaters,” says McCubbin. “It was too fancy for us. Of
course, fish is adventuresome for us. I made three meals for $60. It might be a help for
someone looking to be creative, but I don’t see myself going back there.”
McCubbin’s secret weapon is her slow cooker. With it she makes chili, italian roast beef,
and chicken parmesan. When her meal plan falls through, McCubbin calls her husband
and asks him to stop at Kroger on the way home. “He usually says, ‘Let’s just go out,’”
says McCubbin, which they do about once a week. They usually choose Mexican food
because the boys like it and Mom can order a margarita. McCubbin recently subscribed
to Every Day With Rachael Ray, lured by the promise of meals in 30 minutes, hoping to
add to her cooking repertoire. “I’m not the kind of person who can take an onion and
some wine and make a meal. I’m a recipe gal.”
Dinner on the Go
When I ask Jennifer Crews what’s for dinner, she laughs. Jennifer teaches reading at
JCPS’s Moore Traditional School. After working with 6th-8th graders all day, she comes
home to four children. Sean, 17, is into Boy Scouts, theatre, and he plays in two bands.
Sixteen-year-old Jimmy is in ROTC Color Guard and Boy Scouts. Heather, 11, competes
as a member of the US Gymnastics Association, and 7-year-old Allen is a Cub Scout and
competes in “whatever sport is in season.”
Crews aims for a family meal together but says there’s usually someone missing or
grabbing food and heading out the door. “How did women do it before?” she muses. “I
hear people say, ‘We had a set time for meals and you had to be home.’ I admire that.
But how did they do it?” Crews says she doesn’t mind cooking. She makes spaghetti,
hamburgers, chicken breasts and Mexican style entrees (“it’s the same stuff; it’s just in
different wrappers”). Her frustrations come from planning and cleaning up, although her
kids help by setting the table and doing dishes.
Sometimes it’s hard to cook for so many different tastes. “Jimmy and Sean don’t care for
soup, and Allen doesn’t like spaghetti.” And husband Bill is trying to lose weight by eating
less at suppertime. Usually Crews does her planning on the car-ride home from work,
sometimes stopping at the grocery for a rotisserie chicken. When all else fails there’s
“breakfast for supper” or Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, which they all love. “One night I
was fixing mac and cheese, and the water was boiling and we were out of milk,” Crews
remembers. “How can we be out of milk? I looked for cream, but I didn’t have that either.
So I made it without the milk. I just added a little more butter. It didn’t taste bad.”
There is one indispensable item in Crews’ pantry. She once made an urgent trip to the
grocery for ketchup before her family would come to the table. “There has to be
ketchup!”
Let Hubby Do It
Sharon Dekker has a deal many women would envy: after work some nights, she rides
her horse for an hour while her husband Michael cooks!
When Sharon started dating Michael in college, she had no idea her future husband
would embrace cooking as a hobby. “He lived on his own for three years,” Sharon
remembers. “He had to either learn to cook or eat out all the time.”
Now Michael cooks more than half the time, and he’s the one who takes the initiative on
planning and cooking. “He usually has some idea what he wants to make that week, and I
have some ideas. We shop together. It’s a compromise, because we both hate to shop.”
Most weekends Michael and Sharon cook up two or three meals together and coast on
them through the week. Michael’s specialties are pizzas and pastas. Their fall-back
meals include canned soup and sandwiches, although they often have homemade soup
put by in the freezer. They like to get sushi from the Kroger deli, and they use the slow
cooker often on weekends.
Usually mealtime is just Sharon and Michael, although for six months Sharon’s 16-year-
old niece lived with them. “We’d cook dinner and she’d look at it and say, “I’ll just have a
corndog.” Their frustrations with food generally come during weeks when they’re so
rushed at the end of the day that they don’t feel like following their plan. “Then on Friday
we’ve only made two dishes and we have all this food we either have to cook right away
or it gets wasted.”
Candlelit Suppers
When Robbie Battoe’s sons were at home, mealtime was synonymous with family time.
Now that her boys are grown and gone, mealtime is still family time even though there
are only two at the table. These days Battoe cooks for herself and her husband of 34
years, Bob.
Robbie Battoe is minister of congregational care at St. John UMC in Prospect. After long
hours nurturing others, she comes home and fixes food. Many nights she cooks the
whole meal on the grill: marinated chicken breasts, fresh vegetables, and fresh bread in
a skillet with olive oil. She tosses a salad and serves the meal, with candlelight, on the
patio.
Recently Battoe made what she calls a “healthy conversion.” She was concerned about
health issues, particularly in light of family history and the incidence of diabetes in the
aging general population. She found her knees aching and her blood sugar creeping up
and vowed to lose weight — she lost 40 pounds.
Battoe had always been a health-conscious cook, but now she says, “The junk food is
gone.” She no longer uses canned vegetables, her casserole days are over, and she
serves no white rice, white flour, or white bread.
She recalls when her older son was five he “shared” at school that his mother’s favorite
thing to do was “lay in the bathtub and read cookbooks.” “I did some bizarre cooking,”
Battoe admits with a laugh. “Home-made crackers. I made my own yogurt.” She baked
sourdough bread from a starter she kept alive for seven years, moving it with her from
state to state.
She and the boys used to research different cultures and cuisines and cook foods from
other countries. “We had fun times cooking in the kitchen,” says Battoe. “Some of our
greatest talks, too. I’d say ‘Come chop some celery,’ and I’d learn about the latest girl.”
When her sons were teenagers and active in sports, Battoe specialized in “volume
cooking,” making huge quantities of food to freeze. Her Monday meatloaf would reappear
as the meat in tacos, then evolve into chili on Friday. On practice nights she often made
stir-fry. But Battoe carefully guarded mealtimes. “The TV was never on, and we always
sat down as a family. If someone was late, we waited for that person.” Battoe made sure
her sons knew how to cook, and “both are very adequate cooks today.”
Battoe’s least favorite part of the process is grocery shopping. Shopping was her “time
away” if Bob could stay with the young boys. These days Battoe and her husband treat
the errand as a “partner thing.” They get coffee and take their time in the store, laughing
and visiting with friends. She always kept an on-going list on the fridge for the family to
add to when they used the last of something. “Hugs for Bob” has appeared on the list
under “cheerios.”
“You go through phases,” says Battoe. “When you’re a newlywed you’re cooking to
please. Then you’re throwing it together. But now, after 34 years, food is not the focus.
Being together is the focus.
“I tried to give [cooking] my best, put some effort into it, give it some thought. When I did,
I knew what I fixed was good for them, and I could say, ‘I’ve been a good Mom today.’”•
Three of every four American adults are eating dinner at home, but preparing it from
scratch is now the choice of only one-in-three, and restaurant take-out has overtaken sit-
down dining.
• In 2005, the average American ate 80 meals at restaurants and 57 take-home meals.
• Forty-two percent of adults are purchasing supermarket take-out each month.
Source: Food Technology magazineThe Crock-Pot® may seem like a relic from
an avocado-appliance, 8-track-tape-playing world. But Rival® reports selling over 100
million slow cookers since their debut in 1970. And this humble appliance is used —
often — by everyone interviewed for this article.
ELAINE JACK lives in Goshen and makes a weekly menu plan from two seasonal lists of
family-approved recipes.
