How the Food Network taught me not to feed a family.
I was a single girl in New York for so many years that a PB&J with baby carrots on the side became my default dinner. Why cook for one?
Unless I was hosting a dinner party and changed gears. Here’s how that looked:
- First, carefully, methodically, maniacally, watch a full episode of Barefoot Contessa with the rapt attention of a med student scrubbing in for the first time. Wait, do what with the arugula? Also, what is arugula?
- Next, scour the city for specialty ingredients, spending more money than my entire grocery bill from the month before.
- Bring it all home with four hours in the kitchen, recreating butter-laden masterpieces for a table full of dazzled friends.
It was feast or famine, literally!
The magical formula that changed the way I cook
Things changed fast after I got married and added three little mouths to feed. It was exciting. And urgent. I needed to cook quick crowd pleasers for all ages, and do it without spending 80 dollars on cheese every night.
I experimented. I cooked through trial and error.
Error.
Error.
A little more error.
And I finally figured out a four-part method for updating any recipe into a doable, nourishing meal that still works today:
Cut sugar
Add healthy ingredients
Take shortcuts
Make it kid-friendly
Sounds simple right? But how?
What do shortcuts look like when you’re trying to stir pasta on a steaming stove top with a toddler hanging off your leg, begging for a banana?
Does “kid-friendly” mean taking twenty extra minutes shaping zucchini into rosebuds?
Can one be called upon to adapt recipes into health-ified versions of classics when one hasn’t showered for three days?
These are good questions.
The answers vary.
And for me, it all started when we moved to Italy.
“Test-ever.” I leaned forward, hoping the taxi driver could hear me better. “Um, Trasdata?”
We’d just arrived in Italy, fresh off an overnight flight with the four largest suitcases we could find on the Internet in 2008. Unfortunately, our driver had no idea what I was saying. I handed him a paper with our handwritten address, and he finally recognized the word I’d garbled so badly. “Ah, si!”
Lesson one: It’s pronounced Tra-stev-ray.
That’s the part of Rome where we’d find our temporary apartment. It was ours for three months, enough time to get acquainted with the city and decide which neighborhood was right for the full four years ahead.
Of course, that would mean peeling myself off the bed during daylight hours to find an apartment. Jetlag and early pregnancy are a wicked combination.
Eventually I rallied long enough for us to stroll through the cobble-stoned streets. It was like walking through a tourist’s postcard. Sun dappled alleyways. Crisp fall air. Ivy hanging from stone buildings older than my country’s entire existence.
We ordered a cappuccino and cornetto at the local bar and did it at the right time of day. Every guidebook advised us to not, under any circumstances, order a cappuccino after 11am.
Because milk is for breakfast.
And also for children.
“Consider the humble cappuccino,” suggests Beppe Severgnini in La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind. He continues with a list of other childish choices a newcomer or tourist might make on a visit. “After ten o’clock in the morning, it is unethical, and possibly even unlawful, to order one.
You wouldn’t have one in the afternoon unless the weather was very cold. Needless to say, sipping a cappuccino after a meal is something only non-Italians do.
Once an English friend called this sort of thing ‘food fascism.’ I told her she was exaggerating.
She had ordered a cappuccino after her evening meal, and the waiter refrained from calling the police.”
Mistakes were there to be made, especially around food, but Severgnini’s take helped me relax.
A little.
Lesson two: Tag it and bag it.
Our next lesson in Italian culture came at the grocery store.
When in Rome, one weighs bananas, cucumbers and other fresh fruits and vegetables while still in the produce aisle.
You use a machine that spits out a specific sticker noting the price. You press it to the plastic bag and head toward the checkout.
Unless you don’t.
That’s when the checker is forced to stand up, leaving the stool where she sits next to the register. She’ll sigh and without a word, abandon the rest of your groceries, alone and lifeless on the conveyor belt as she walks to the sticker producing machine herself.
Meanwhile, silly Americans have no choice but to sheepishly shrug a smiling apology to the Romans still waiting in line.
It was a crash course in all things Italian.
Everything in Rome is a contradiction in time.
Scooters zooming over ancient streets.
Wifi.
Aqueducts.
Bedazzled jeans.
iPhones in castles.
Men wearing crisply tailored suits outside the crumbling Coliseum where lions once ate Christians as entertainment.
Later that first week in Rome, a small group of us gathered for dinner in another neighborhood, Testaccio.
Literally built on top of ancient ruins, part of the restaurant’s floor was made of thick glass, offering a surreal view of old world tunnels under your feet.
Our waiter wore a full tuxedo as he arrived to explain the specials in English. They sounded amazing and I asked if he could tell me more about a particular dish.
His response: “It is enough for you to know that it exists.”
Neat!
Why is it that you can have all the pieces in place for a wonderful experience and yet … something almost always goes sideways?
Since then, I’ve learned that cooking for kids is the same. Expect it to be weird!
Even the most determined of us can only cook meals from scratch and enjoy a pleasant family dinner some of the time. Not because of crusty Italian waiters but because, kids.
Lower your expectations.
That’s the single best advice I’d go back and give myself in those early days both for my early days in Rome, and for my early days of parenting—especially for mealtimes.
Even if you apply every single method in the pages that follow, even if you cook masterpieces you’d proudly serve a future Joanna Gaines at her outdoor table with all those twinkly lights overhead in the trees, you’re still feeding kids.
Tired, hungry, little kids.
And take heart.
The goal is that with patience, practice, and rock-bottom expectations for how it all plays out, we’re building a culture of happy family dinners. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and family dinners won’t transform on a dime.
Reaching the point where you actually enjoy meals together and create memories your kids will look back on doesn’t happen in one night.
This culture of happy family dinners is stitched together over a lifetime, a cumulative total of time spent together.
Little moments stacked one on top of another.
Standing around the stove, reaching for the last slice of pizza, feeding your baby for the first time.
None of it is possible without you.
Your heartfelt effort, patience and calm. It’s you!
Expect that it’s not going to go well all the time. No matter what you try, some nights are sweet—many are exhausting.
Keep going. Just keep going.
Journal Entry
Hurry up and eat
November 26
Number of years living in Rome: 0
Number of babies: 0
Our first dinner party took place 24 hours after we arrived. Our friends, Amy and Dan, practically natives of Rome after spending eight years here, hosted 10 adults and 7 children … all under age 4.
No one had a full conversation all night.
My second clue about how our life would look in the next few years came when half the party started digging in while the rest were still dishing up. “Italians just eat,” Dan said. “You don’t have to wait.”
Recipe Makeover Step 1: Cut sugar
Remember the four-part method I discovered for feeding a family well? This is the first step. Cut sugar.
We had just arrived in Italy. Paul started going to his new office every day and I was left to focus on my new favorite activity.
Not exploring the ancient city outside my own doorstep.
I wasn’t studying the language.
Nope.
Instead, I spent hours devouring every parenting book, magazine article and news story I could get my hands on.
It wasn’t easy to collect reading material printed in English but when I did, the news was … bad.
Especially for American kids. Our eating habits were out of whack, and causing problems. Sugar was everywhere, with no signs of slowing down.
All of this sugar has consequences.
The U.S. also has one of the highest overall obesity rates in the world, and the highest rate of childhood obesity. Diabetes has doubled in teenagers over the last twenty years.
It hasn’t always been this way though.
Our ancestors lived hard lives. Not only did they never bask in the glow of Netflix gently asking if you’re still watching, you can be sure they ate less sugar.
Picture your grandmother’s great-grandmother, who in 1820 ate just a little more than six pounds of sugar a year. Cut to 2020 and Americans consume almost 60 pounds of sugar every year.
All of the sugar. All of the years!
Terrifying.
So I resolved to cut back.
This was easier in Italy where bottled, canned, and packaged foods are used less and have less added sugar, but even there they love Coca Cola.
One of the simplest ways to slash extra sugar in the States, or anywhere, is obvious and easy: soda.
Once I realized how much I could remove from our lives with one simple (and expensive) habit, I thought I had this “healthy eating thing” in the bag.
Then came juice.
I grew up thinking juice was really good for me.
That the more I drank, the healthier I’d be. Vitamin C!
Too bad it was mostly sugar.
Imagine my husband’s horror when I suggested that if we want our kids to have a better shot at a healthy life, it’s time to nix the juice. Growing up in Florida, he was taught that orange juice held a special place next to Jesus.
But that’s parenting for you.
Pivoting, even when it means changing your mind about childhood traditions and experiences.
(Remember smoking? Who among us wore bike helmets? And please tell me I wasn’t the only baby who never snuggled into a $300 car seat.)
Other sugary culprits that won’t surprise even the most bleary-eyed of us are cakes, cookies, candy and ice cream.
But what about sneaky places for sugar to hide? We had access to a fair amount of American groceries through the commissary for UN employees and when I started looking at labels for “added sugars,” it blew my mind.
I found at least a couple of Oreos’ worth of sugar in places like spaghetti sauce, peanut butter, soup, bread, mayonnaise, cured meats and even ketchup.
Reading labels changes everything.
Go ahead, cook your own potato chips
It turned out that cooking myself was an easy way to sidestep a lot of added sugar.
Now, don’t get me wrong.
I’m not talking about using Splenda instead of sugar. Or substituting honey “because it isn’t sugar.” It is!
(Also, don’t come at me with that fat free sour cream. We both know that’s not what God intended.)
Making my own salad dressing, for example, is usually an improvement over anything at the store. I don’t do it all the time because I’m a busy mom, with a career, and an average human’s amount of energy each day (read: Not Beyoncé.).
But on the occasions that I do, I’ll likely use higher quality ingredients than something from a supermarket shelf.
There won’t be corn syrup. We’ll skip the extra fillers. And above all, the fresh taste is just better—even without added sugar!
But if there was one area where I got serious about slashing sugar, it was baking.
Following a pumpkin quick bread recipe that calls for two cups of sugar? I only added one. And it worked! Things were certainly less sweet, but they were still delicious.
Muffins sweetened with applesauce or bananas worked perfectly for babies under two, who are advised by the CDC to not eat any added sugar at all.
My toddlers practically lived on muffins and why not? They’re easy to make, you can fill them with tons of good-for-you ingredients, and they freeze like a dream.
Of course, I only learned all this after we got our Italian oven to function.
We found a “permanent” apartment for the rest of our time in Rome.
It was near Villa Borghese, a beautiful place to walk, close enough to the historic center and easily reachable by subway.
The bad news was discovered shortly after moving in: two of our three kitchen appliances didn’t work.
Not in the way they should. Not in the 21st century. And definitely not for the price of our rent.
The dishwasher didn’t wash any dishes.
Instead, the sad little box under our counter just sloshed a little water around for two hours before giving up.
The water pipe was filled with calcium, a huge issue for tap water in Rome where it travels through ancient aqueducts before arriving at your tap.
The stove was another issue, also from another era.
You had to light the teeny, tiny burners with a match.
I pictured trying to do this with a baby in my arms, and cried. So I took matters into my pregnant hands and approached the elderly couple who owned our apartment, boldly asking them to replace them.
Prego?
They graciously agreed to replace both. Hooray!
Sadly, the celebration ended abruptly when it came time for installation. Paul and I were out of town, visiting a friend in Paris since the rest of our home goods were still on a ship from the U.S..
That was the day our landlords made a same-day appointment.
Here is a shortened version of the actual email they sent us.
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: xxxx@tiscali.it
Date: Tue, Feb 10 at 5:13 PM
Subject: Flat V. Nizza
To: xxxxmathews@gmail.com
To Charity and Paul,
We have been trying to get in touch with you by phone since
yesterday, but it seems impossible to have an answer from you. We have
ordered the new dishwasher and a gas-cooker. But before
delivery a new plug has to be applied in the wall by the electrician
for the gas-cooker. We had managed to obtain an appointment by the
electrician for today, but having had no answer from you we had to
cancel it. So the whole thing has to be reorganized again.
Let us know how to proceed, considering that making any arrangement
with these people is a nightmare.
Regards.
And so it went.
Eventually we got our appliances. Our shipment arrived and our landlords were wonderful through it all. I was ready to cook.
Now what?
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Read Section 2: The Strategies >>
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