It was sunny but it’s getting gloomier by the minute. I refuse to make that a metaphor, though, on a relatively calm day after a surprisingly calm holiday.
Yesterday, I did everything the easy way, and it made me wonder why there is so much opposition to it. Because I can’t eat a lot of additives, it wasn’t that the shortcuts were filled with them, with chemicals. They weren’t.
So why does it matter if I prepped them or got them already prepped?
As I said earlier on Spoutible, I suspect that it’s a way to leverage women’s time, to feed into that endless narrative that whatever we’re doing, we aren’t doing it well enough. That the responsibility of the holidays largely and most often falls on us, and if we are not perfect, they are not perfect.
And it leaves me wondering…says who?
I know that there are men who participate or even do all of the cooking, so we don’t need to derail with a “not all.” The reality is holiday prep and execution remains very, very gendered.
Nothing I did yesterday was complicated. The only thing I made, excluding the sauces added for flavor, were the mini turkey meatloaves, and the hardest part of that is just mixing everything together. They cooked really quickly in a muffin tin too, about 35 was all they needed. And a corn casserole, but that started with a cornbread mix from Whole Foods.
And the end result was delicious. It didn’t require waking at 6 am to get things started. It didn’t generate a ton of mess, either, though my dad did the cleanup, something he always has done, including for all those years with my mom.
If you enjoy all of the time in the kitchen, and relish the opportunity to take your cooking to full throttle, then I am certainly not telling you to change a thing. My brother used to love to cook Thanksgiving, it was his favorite opportunity to show off his culinary skills. He insisted on it; we were only ever allowed to bring dessert or paper plates or napkins or whatever.
But if it is not your thing, if you feel trapped in a kitchen while everyone else is having a good time somewhere else, I suggest taking some steps to make it easier.
Because why not?
And that’s it for me this week, I hope you have a great day and a relaxing weekend.
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