To Parents of Young Children

(and all who care to cook with love)

I am in a season of very intense work. I’m working 14-16 hours per day, much of it on a project with a long time horizon, which means the amount of work isn’t validated by a commensurate level of external validation and verifiable progress. Meanwhile, I have a toddler (inherently attention-grabbing) and an exceedingly cognizant and pining 11-month old. And I am the cook in our house.

I’ve had many, many conversations with parents of young kids lately, mostly mothers but sometimes fathers, for whom cooking is not just a source of stress, but of guilt. Life with young children is full, and it is difficult to find time to cook healthy meals that reflect care and love. Even if one could find the time to spend 60 minutes or more to cook on a regular basis, that time can often feel like it requires ignoring the kids, rather than caring for them. I am a big proponent of including kids in cooking early on (if anyone knows of an egg-cracking competition Saoirse can participate in, let me know…I think she’d win), but that only goes so far. I know so many young parents who feel so burdened by cooking for their kids. I feel that way sometimes. But cooking is one of the primary ways I experienced love growing up, and it’s one of the ways I express love to my family—both Melissa and my girls. So I’ve had to spend some time early in parenthood troubleshooting the tension between kids who demand attention, and cooking food which expresses the love I have for them.

There are endless versions of the basic sentiment that attention is the simplest, purest form of love. I thought it was a Simone Weil quote, but according to my brief search it looks like the Weil quote refers to the connection between attention and generosity, not attention and love. Still, the connection between love and attention is well-cited.

Here’s what I think parents of young children, and all people who cook for others with little time to spare, are looking for: we want to express love through cooking that requires minimum concentrated attention. We want to cook things that involve care and time, but not our constant attention, because we want to direct our attention towards our loved ones, and the responsibilities we have related to caring for them.

Every now and then, in the coming months, I’ll share what I’m learning about how to do this well. In this post, I’ll share one chain of meals I cook that require little of my time, but that fill the house with wonderful smells and truly make me feel like I’m serving my family well.

Step 1: Roast a chicken (or two! or three!)

There is nothing I do that requires less of my time, but makes me feel like I’m really extravagantly loving my family through my cooking, like roasting a bird. If you’re intimidated by the process, I promise you it’s really so much easier than you think. Just give it a try. Really.

My favorite roast chicken recipe is Samin Nosrat’s Buttermilk-Marinated Roast Chicken. With literally ten minutes of your focused attention, you can prepare for your family two or three beautiful chickens on a weeknight. Serve with a simple salad, and you have a beautiful, healthy and impressive meal for your family. Serve on a Monday or Tuesday night.

Step 2: Make chicken broth

Using the leftover bones, including the uncooked wing that you cut off (per the recipe, when you made the chickens earlier in the week), make chicken broth. After maybe five minutes of prep, this can percolate in your house for the better part of the day (or evening, if you work out of the home), once again filling up your home with really wonderful smells.

Chicken broth is a cook’s secret weapon. You can make 4-7 quarts of chicken broth in one batch that can be used in meals throughout the week, and homemade broth will drastically improve the taste of what you cook without drastically increasing the time you spend on cooking.

You can even turn chicken broth into a simple meal. Eat like the Bolognese do, and add meat tortellini to your broth. Eat like the Bolognese do only differently by adding whatever greens you have in the fridge (escarole, spinach…even romaine lettuce) to the broth. Don’t like tortellini? Add rice instead. That’s two meals out of the week taken care of…three if you made enough chicken for leftovers. Or, heck, if you have leftover chicken, you can also shred it and add it to the soup. The point here, folks, is that there are options. Easy, available and relatively frugal options.

Step 3: On the weekend, make a long-cooked sauce

This is for the weekend, because it will take more than ten minutes of your focused attention, but wow is it worth it. Plus, if you make it right, you’ll have quality leftovers (leftovers that are sometimes better than when you first made it) for the following week. I’ll probably do an entire post on my favorite long-cooked sauces and sugos, but here I’ll share Melissa’s all-time favorite: Pork Shoulder with Salsa Genovese (this version cuts the recipe in half…I’d just double the recipe as listed here so you have plenty of leftovers). You can serve this meal by shredding the pork and mixing it with the pasta, but why not serve the pasta as its own course, while slicing up the pork roast to serve on its own? One good answer to that question is “because there is no way my toddler is sitting through a multi-course meal,” and that’s a totally legitimate answer. You can serve the roast at the same time as the pasta, or just shred the pork and mix it in with the pasta. No matter what you do, it will be impressive and delicious.

Here’s the main thing I want young parents to hear: you are doing a wonderful job. Your kids don’t feel less loved because you get takeout or use frozen chicken tenders for dinner. This is, in large part, about you. You deserve solutions and ideas which help you feel like you are expressing love well, and caring well, while lessening the burden you feel to do everything, all the time. And you deserve the satisfaction of pulling a roast chicken out of the oven, and putting it in front of your family.