Our lives revolve around food: what to eat, when to eat it, how to prepare it, and who to share it with. We schedule our days around mealtimes because not only do we need food to survive, but also because it’s a welcome break from any uninspiring day-to-day routines we may follow at home or work. In the last year, my relationship with food has evolved as I had a baby, left my full-time job to become self-employed, and figured out how to continue cooking and eating easy, healthy dishes with a baby around.
My love affair with food began when I was completing my PhD and needed a hobby to give my brain a break from graduate school. I prepared simple recipes and set up an early version of my blog, Kitchening Around. I adopted a flexible, resourceful cooking style – substituting, tweaking, and basically winging it to put a meal together. This method was the perfect antidote to my otherwise precision, repetition, and hypothesis-driven scientific life. I haven’t looked back since...even when I plowed through blue Sour Patch Kids during pregnancy.
In the first few days after my son was born, I was discombobulated and delirious. The living room looked like a baby frat house with bottles, bibs, and blankets strewn about. I had given up on showering, organization, and social interaction.
That’s when I wondered - are all new parents pathetic zombies for the first four months? Do they have the energy to cook or eat? How do new moms allow themselves recovery time while brushing away guilt about milk output and messy homes? How do parents find time to soak in the blooming personality of their little one while also having adult conversations that don’t involve baby logistics? How do parents learn not to be so hard on themselves, to laugh at themselves and the baby once in a while, and in general not take everything so seriously?
My hope is that by reading my stories and recipes, parents see that it is possible to make easy, flavorful meals even when they have a newborn baby in the house, perhaps even as a reprieve from the stark change in lifestyle. I also want to encourage parents to share their own unfiltered anecdotes about life with a newborn because there is tremendous humor in parenting, especially once you have had a chance to sleep through the night, change your underwear, and perhaps enjoy an uninterrupted meal. Finally, I want to highlight that as a new parent, it’s easy to focus on perceived mistakes or feel helpless once in a while. However, it’s important to take credit for a job well done, because there is really no perfect way to parent. Similar to cooking, you’re often learning by trial and error - and that’s a fine strategy because babies are resilient little beings.
I look forward to publishing tales from the fourth trimester in the coming months!