On Becoming A Domestic Goddess

Anyone who wants to see more than the inside of my fridge is invited to visit the various photos I've posted of this stunning autumn on Long Island.

I can explain about the fridge picture. Notice how bare this former chamber-of-horrors is? That's because the picture was taken on a Monday morning, and that's what my fridge is like every Monday before I do the week's shopping: empty.

I can explain why this is important. Anyone who's ever raised a puppy will remember that there's this period, of a few weeks, when the cute little snub nose you once kissed when no one was looking, suddenly springs out and becomes the great Fuji that the dog is stuck with for life. As a fourteen year old, the same thing happened to me. I mean, I could remember looking in the mirror one day and thinking, "Jesus, where did that come from?" I'd acquired my own great protrusion and now I was done with growing up.

But only in the physical sense. The acquisition of life-skills was still long in coming. Somewhere in my thirties, I decided to get my car inspected on an annual basis, and to see the dentist every eighteen months or so. Somewhere in my forties, I decided that I was wasting too much time looking for things, that it was high time that I started troubling myself to keep my most commonly used possessions -- my keys, the bills, whatever book I was reading -- in the same place. So I started putting things away. That small effort has added months back to my life.

But the basic management of the family meal still eluded me. This disorganization was a natural hangover from my career days, when I could seldom find the mental energy to plan and shop as well as cook. But four years into my 'retirement', we were still eating out way too much, or getting take-away. And we were throwing away way too much food. To top it all off, what meals I did manage to cook always seemed to involve at least 3 trips to Austin's beloved Central Market.

But moving to Cold Scream Harbor has made me take one more step in becoming an adult. With no Central Market a mere five minutes away, it was simply no longer possible to just wing it every day, not if I wanted to stay out of restaurants. I love dining out, but do it too often and you enjoy it less. And you take in too many calories.

But how to get from the disorganized me to a domestic goddess? It seemed to me that I had two things going for me: a computer nook just off of the kitchen in our new house and a fine collection of recipes, from cookbooks and New York Times e-clippings, to guide and inspire me. Surely I could use these two assets to conquer chaos.

But of course to solve a problem you must first understand the cause of the problem (well, often that's true). Hadn't I started every week in Austin with good intentions? I'd always had a few menus in my head, as well as a list, whenever I headed off to the store. But my plans would quickly fall apart. I'd get to Central Market and see some in-season veg I fancied. Or, later when I got home, I'd pull out some veg or meat from the fridge and not be able to reconstruct what, exactly, the menu was. Or -- and this happened a lot -- I'd remember perfectly well what meal I'd intended to prepare, but I'd look at what I'd bought and suddenly loose interest: teriyaki chicken again?

So I started one Monday morning at my laptop, looking at my recipe box and coming up with six menus based on whatever I truly fancied eating and cooking. This time, I actually wrote down what I intended to cook, with a list of the necessary ingredients. I realized that if I kept simply adding to this weekly diary, it wouldn't be long before I would never have to wonder what to cook in a given week. I could always raid past diary entries for meals that worked or could be improved on.

The diary helps me from week to week, but it also helps during the week. Nowadays, if I've planned to buy celery but get waylaid by a nice head of fennel at the store, no sweat! I have my menu with me and can jot down any opportune changes. And if there is a change in the family schedule, I can always return to my laptop and look up the ramifications of dropping a meal. Not surprisingly, the meal diary has become a record of what I have on hand. Like a lot of people, I keep a second fridge for storing meats and other items, but I'm great at forgetting what's out there, breeding in the garage. Now the diary keeps me sorted out. If I have extra white kidney beans, too many to put in the Very Simple Cassoulet I'm making, I freeze them and make a note in the meal diary to use them next week in an Italian escarole salad.

Under the new Goddess Regime, one of the happier moments of my week is when I browse a few of those cookbooks I just had to buy at one time or another, and start drooling. As I hinted earlier, my biggest enemy has been boredom. I'm so easily bored, I can't even eat grocery store pre-prepared food for very long. Even Central Market, which had no end of pre-made meatballs and tofu salads and Thai pastas to choose from, all prepared by their in-house staff, never really pleased me. Most pre-prep, to me, tastes like all other pre-prep.

Not that the diary is everything. To be a domestic goddess, as I've learned from the truly divine books of Nigella Lawson, particularly How to Eat, it helps to have inculcated in oneself the idea of a culinary repertoire. Life is simpler if you have a couple dozen dishes memorized, maybe not right down to the tablespoon and teaspoon, but something you can just perform without thinking too much. Too much novelty is stressful. Too little and you're dialing for take-away again. So I've discovered how useful it is to always have the means to whip out a few favorites always at hand.

The last few months have been a learning experience, one where I had to ask myself why I couldn't approach family maintenance with the same zeal I once devoted to working as a computer programmer. And in some ways, housewifery should be more fun than programming was. If the problems got dull at work, there wasn't a whole lot I could do (well, other than breaking the system myself and riding in as a hero when all seemed lost; but that's a little too risky for my blood). As the family chef, I've discovered that I can make the day as simple or as intricate as I want. I get to set the challenges.

Next challenge: vegetable crepes with a gruyere sauce, and a roasted pear salad with walnuts on the side. And if the prospect of that can't make me happy, then I really do need to go back to a real job and be reminded how bad real drudgery can be.