* . *
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
Saturday, June 21, 2025
Earth-News
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’: Civic Players bring ‘Young Frankenstein’ to life – Yahoo

    Civic Players Deliver a Hilarious and Unforgettable Performance of ‘Young Frankenstein

    ‘Wheel of Fortune’: Amputee Wins $60,000 After Breaking Incredible ‘Curse’ – Hastings Tribune

    Wheel of Fortune’ Amputee Breaks Incredible ‘Curse’ to Win $60,000!

    North Star Sports & Entertainment Network: Coming soon – KTTC News

    North Star Sports & Entertainment Network: Coming soon – KTTC News

    Safety concerns in Deep Ellum create apprehension as the entertainment district gains visitors – CBS News

    Safety Concerns Surge Amid Deep Ellum’s Booming Popularity and Growing Crowds

    Elisabeth Moss’ ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Emmy chances, by the numbers – Yahoo

    Elisabeth Moss’ ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Emmy chances, by the numbers – Yahoo

    ‘Gangs of London’ Producer Explains Season 3 Deaths, Hypes Season 4 – Citizen Tribune

    Gangs of London’ Producer Reveals Shocking Season 3 Deaths and Teases Exciting Season 4

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    Tech Champions with Leo Bletnitsky of Healthy Technology Solutions – Buzz Media Group

    Meet Tech Champion Leo Bletnitsky of Healthy Technology Solutions

    Crypto’s true revolution is about humanity, not technology – Cointelegraph

    Crypto’s Real Revolution: Transforming Humanity Beyond Technology

    $1 Billion Problem: New Technology Could Save Your Daily Cup of Coffee – SciTechDaily

    The $1 Billion Challenge: How New Technology Could Rescue Your Daily Cup of Coffee

    Canada’s construction industry gets serious about investing in technology as pressure mounts to do more with less – Yahoo Finance

    Canada’s Construction Industry Accelerates Tech Investments to Overcome Growing Challenges and Boost Efficiency

    Workforce Technology Eases Staffing Shortages in Rural Health Care – AJMC

    Workforce Technology Eases Staffing Shortages in Rural Health Care – AJMC

    Get the lead out: Putting new at-home lead testing technology to the test | Denver7 Investigates – Denver7

    Putting the Latest At-Home Lead Testing Technology to the Ultimate Test

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’: Civic Players bring ‘Young Frankenstein’ to life – Yahoo

    Civic Players Deliver a Hilarious and Unforgettable Performance of ‘Young Frankenstein

    ‘Wheel of Fortune’: Amputee Wins $60,000 After Breaking Incredible ‘Curse’ – Hastings Tribune

    Wheel of Fortune’ Amputee Breaks Incredible ‘Curse’ to Win $60,000!

    North Star Sports & Entertainment Network: Coming soon – KTTC News

    North Star Sports & Entertainment Network: Coming soon – KTTC News

    Safety concerns in Deep Ellum create apprehension as the entertainment district gains visitors – CBS News

    Safety Concerns Surge Amid Deep Ellum’s Booming Popularity and Growing Crowds

    Elisabeth Moss’ ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Emmy chances, by the numbers – Yahoo

    Elisabeth Moss’ ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Emmy chances, by the numbers – Yahoo

    ‘Gangs of London’ Producer Explains Season 3 Deaths, Hypes Season 4 – Citizen Tribune

    Gangs of London’ Producer Reveals Shocking Season 3 Deaths and Teases Exciting Season 4

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    Tech Champions with Leo Bletnitsky of Healthy Technology Solutions – Buzz Media Group

    Meet Tech Champion Leo Bletnitsky of Healthy Technology Solutions

    Crypto’s true revolution is about humanity, not technology – Cointelegraph

    Crypto’s Real Revolution: Transforming Humanity Beyond Technology

    $1 Billion Problem: New Technology Could Save Your Daily Cup of Coffee – SciTechDaily

    The $1 Billion Challenge: How New Technology Could Rescue Your Daily Cup of Coffee

    Canada’s construction industry gets serious about investing in technology as pressure mounts to do more with less – Yahoo Finance

    Canada’s Construction Industry Accelerates Tech Investments to Overcome Growing Challenges and Boost Efficiency

    Workforce Technology Eases Staffing Shortages in Rural Health Care – AJMC

    Workforce Technology Eases Staffing Shortages in Rural Health Care – AJMC

    Get the lead out: Putting new at-home lead testing technology to the test | Denver7 Investigates – Denver7

    Putting the Latest At-Home Lead Testing Technology to the Ultimate Test

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
Earth-News
No Result
View All Result
Home News

Having Kids Stole My Favorite Hobby From Me. Here’s How I’m Getting It Back.

June 3, 2024
in News
Having Kids Stole My Favorite Hobby From Me. Here’s How I’m Getting It Back.
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

Food

Parenthood took cooking from me. Here’s how I’m getting it back.

A woman stirs something on a stove while also holding a toddler.

Zanuck/iStock/Getty Images Plus. 

In the small town where I live, there are few takeout options. The community has worked around this fact with active use of meal trains. I always sign up. And as I press foil-wrapped containers into my children’s hands, sending them to knock on the doors of friends and acquaintances—or to not knock, to drop on a doormat and retreat quietly—I tell them why cooking and delivering food to people who have new babies, or who are ill or impacted by natural disasters, is important. Food is the thing that we all share, I say; it’s a way to tell someone you see them.

I do not tell them about my own ambivalence about making that food. It’s new. “I used to love to cook,” says nearly every parent I know, “until I had children.”

I enjoyed cooking, too, probably thanks to my own mother. She is enthusiastically present while cooking and eating. She paid attention through meals, coaxed me to talk as a reticent teenager by assigning me cooking tasks. I made jubilant, chaotic, casual dinners in dorms, apartments, and hostels, in various cities, every year of my adult life. But with small kids, I am nearly always low on time, deluged with physical labor, and cleaning something up long before I enter a kitchen. At the same time, magazines, influencers, and occasionally the New York Times Parenting section tell me that what and how I feed my children will shape their immune systems, palates, and eating habits for life, not to mention the environment and foodways around us. The result is that I spend more time than I’d like to thinking about what my children eat.

The change happened slowly. I never stopped cooking; children need to eat. But suddenly, I could not remember the last time I felt joy, creativity, or pride while making or serving food.

At first I thought my pleasure had been felled, as for others experiencing post-COVID cooking burnout, by stale recipes. Fine. We live in an era of briskly selling cookbooks and so many food blogs they have meta-guides. Yet none of these helped me. The knowing authoritarianism of the domestic goddess, the inaccessibility of the lauded chef, the science-of-food authors who complicated things beyond my means to care or clean up—they all made my malaise worse.

The always growing “quick and easy” genre felt especially tricky. These recipes mostly fell into two camps. First were those that were, despite their claims, quite complex, with hard-to-find ingredients and 16-step instructions that would surely take me longer than the projected 15 minutes. On the other hand, some simple “quick school-night recipes” produced bland food that, mommy blogs seemed to say, was just my lot now. Optimistic advance-prepped casseroles, meatballs, and one-pot meals estranged me from life with small dependents far more than my three funny, hearty-eating children had.

Could I research my way back to joy? I tried to. I talked to friends: sympathetic but unhelpful; those with children missed enjoying cooking, too. A chef: vaguely amused—joy? In cooking? Food journalist Elizabeth Dunn, whose podcast explores the many issues around children and food: The physicality of having small kids, she told me, stole her enjoyment of “the sensory quality of cooking.”

Political scientist and Cookbook Politics author Kennan Ferguson hinted at why books had not helped me. Cookbooks, he said, “both bring you into and demand a collective response.” Many reinforce traditional gender roles and family dynamics. And others are “about performance and enjoyment of performance.” I disliked both categories.

“Our contemporary food culture makes multiple ethical demands on parents,” Ferguson explained. “Cookbooks similarly can feel particularly oppressive about a sense of perfection and performance.”

Finally, I understood my own reaction. Parenting small children can, in its harder moments, feel theatrical to me: performing patience, performing familiarity with new school and playground communities, performing confidence in the precarious social and political systems around our family. And food, obviously, is not only about eating or nourishment. We talk easily these days about how what we eat encompasses logistics, care, attention, economics, politics, environment, culture, a relationship to a physical body. As Ferguson put it, food is about the entire “human sensorium.”

But the sum of the proliferation of food culture, to someone raising a young child, is pressure and judgment. It stems, researchers have found, from the precarity and stress that dominate many aspects of raising small children in this country, and it’s felt by American parents across the economic spectrum. Well-meaning emphasis on the many ways that childhood food exposure shapes our children often leaves out an essential element of preparing and sharing food, one that fights against the anxiety that cripples many contemporary parents: sheer pleasure.

In the same way that children’s eating gets fraught when they’re forced to clean their plates, the joy a parent might take from cooking often dissipates under pressure. And a parent’s happiness matters to children’s physical and mental health and to broader political activism, too.

Holding the importance of my own lost pleasure in my mind alongside the stakes of what my children eat hasn’t exactly brought it back. As Dunn told me, “I still don’t love cooking anymore.” Instead, I’ve looked at the sincere joy in cooking-adjacent moments. Watching my 3-year-old son cut mushrooms with gorgeous determination, or realizing that my elder child learned to crack an egg at school. Listening to them all giggle as they vigorously mix rice, dal, tomatoes, and yogurt together—feeling gratitude for the Indian takeout place a few towns over—and call the process “making butter.” They understand, already, how food can feel alchemical.

One book, though, helped me feel certain that my earnest love of cooking will someday return. A collection of novelist Laurie Colwin’s food essays reminded me of all the things cooking does far beyond nourishing children—offering social connection, aesthetic experimentation, political engagement, sheer deliciousness. She does not emphasize performance or perfection, her recipes are devastatingly simple, and my copy of Home Cooking contains zero photos. Colwin is suggestive rather than prescriptive. I made her chicken with paprika and apples.

A chicken, quartered; two apples, sliced; paprika, dusted; a little butter.

Books

Cooking

Family

Kids

Parenting

Recipes

>>> Read full article>>>
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source : Slate News – https://slate.com/life/2024/06/cooking-kids-parenting-advice-cookbooks-recipes.html?via=rss

Tags: havingnewsstole
Previous Post

My Apologies Used to Be Passive-Aggressive. Then I Had a Revelation.

Next Post

I’m Terrible in Bed With My Wife. With My Other Lover, I’m Epic. I Think I Know Why.

Identifying ecological thresholds from functional traits for optimal ecosystem management – Nature

Unlocking Ecological Thresholds Through Functional Traits for Smarter Ecosystem Management

June 21, 2025
Speed-snap science: Solving for molecular details in a flash – Phys.org

Speed-Snap Science: Unlocking Molecular Secrets in a Flash

June 21, 2025
Fish Suffer Up to 22 Minutes of Intense Pain When Taken Out of Water – ScienceAlert

Fish Suffer Up to 22 Minutes of Intense Pain When Taken Out of Water – ScienceAlert

June 21, 2025
Brief Use of CGM May Enhance Lifestyle Awareness in T2D – Medscape

Brief Use of CGM May Enhance Lifestyle Awareness in T2D – Medscape

June 21, 2025
FIFA Club World Cup 2025: Botafogo stuns PSG, 1-0, in tournament’s first major upset – Yahoo Sports

Botafogo Stuns PSG with a Stunning 1-0 Triumph in FIFA Club World Cup 2025’s Biggest Upset

June 21, 2025
Study: Mass Deportations Would Cost California Economy $275 Billion, Decimate Critical Industries – University of California, Merced

Study: Mass Deportations Would Cost California Economy $275 Billion, Decimate Critical Industries – University of California, Merced

June 21, 2025
‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’: Civic Players bring ‘Young Frankenstein’ to life – Yahoo

Civic Players Deliver a Hilarious and Unforgettable Performance of ‘Young Frankenstein

June 21, 2025
Economics Student Studying Maternal Health Earns National Fellowship – Georgia State University News

Economics Student Studying Maternal Health Earns National Fellowship – Georgia State University News

June 21, 2025
How Tucker Carlson went from war hawk to skeptic – CNN

Tucker Carlson’s Dramatic Shift: From War Hawk to Skeptic

June 21, 2025
Tech Champions with Leo Bletnitsky of Healthy Technology Solutions – Buzz Media Group

Meet Tech Champion Leo Bletnitsky of Healthy Technology Solutions

June 20, 2025

Categories

Archives

June 2025
MTWTFSS
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30 
« May    
Earth-News.info

The Earth News is an independent English-language daily published Website from all around the World News

Browse by Category

  • Business (20,132)
  • Ecology (695)
  • Economy (709)
  • Entertainment (21,610)
  • General (15,488)
  • Health (9,750)
  • Lifestyle (715)
  • News (22,149)
  • People (712)
  • Politics (716)
  • Science (15,929)
  • Sports (21,205)
  • Technology (15,695)
  • World (689)

Recent News

Identifying ecological thresholds from functional traits for optimal ecosystem management – Nature

Unlocking Ecological Thresholds Through Functional Traits for Smarter Ecosystem Management

June 21, 2025
Speed-snap science: Solving for molecular details in a flash – Phys.org

Speed-Snap Science: Unlocking Molecular Secrets in a Flash

June 21, 2025
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

Go to mobile version