What is Cooking?

I was reading this post over at Weighty Matters, a blog which is fast becoming my favorite (I wish I could have Dr. Yoni as my doctor! If I went to Canada do you suppose their health care system would cover me to see him?) about eating out and he and I had a bit of dialogue in the comments about cooking. I remember one time mentioning to my sister who was visiting that I needed to "cook" dinner and she snorted rather derisively at the term, since what I planned to do was boil some pasta and put some pre-made sauce on it. So, apparently to some people, that isn't "cooking". My question to Dr. Freedhoff was quite genuine, I really am not certain that what I routinely do for my family is "cooking" even though I always considered it to be. I always figured that any food I was preparing at home, regardless of if the ingredients come partially or fully from boxes or packages, was cooking. Is it gourmet cooking? I suppose not, but nor is it swinging through a fast food restaurant drive up window.

Anyway, so Dr. Freedhoff said if he could recommend one thing to all families, even the really busy ones, it would be that just ONE meal a week be made totally from scratch, with all the family involved in the preparation and consumed at the table.

Well, the table part we have down, as regular readers know (last night we had one of the kid's friends over for dinner, and even he had to eat at the table with us), but I decided to make this a goal for us on the weekend, to have one meal prepared from scratch. The boy has been asking to help make lasagna for some time (he apparently learned how at the day camp he was at during spring break and wants to show us his mad skillz) so we'll do that this weekend. I hope dry noodles count as "from scratch"! I am willing to try making my own marinara sauce though, but it will almost certainly be made from canned tomatoes and tomato paste, right? Will that still be scratch? It's enough to drive a person crazy!

But in thinking about this topic, I remembered how my mom used to bake bread (she sold it to fund a trip for our family to DisneyLand, a fact which moves me to tears to this day when I think about it, god the things we do for our kids!). I also remembered how sometimes we would make homemade tortillas (I remembered this when I was kind of giggling about Dr. Yoni's comment about "hand pressed tortillas" and I thought, my god, has he ever made homemade tortillas? it takes an ENTIRE DAY and tons of lard!, but I digress) and I thought it sure would be nice if when my mom is visiting we could take a day and make some homemade bread and tortillas. That was the kind of family experience I think Dr. Yoni is referring to, because I remember being in the kitchen and flipping tortillas on a skillet and trying not to burn the tips of my fingers, and I remember we were all involved at some point or another in the process. I also remember we used to do nothing but complain about my mom's bread. It was whole grain, you see. The healthy stuff. I feel bad about that now, and man, what I wouldn't give to be able to have that bread every day now. Oh well, live and learn.

As for exercise so far this week, Monday was a purposeful rest day, yesterday was a not-so-purposeful rest day, but today will most definitely be a treadmill day. Chris is traveling this week, which always makes it just a tiny bit harder to fit the exercise in, but I'll manage, I'm sure.