sunday cooking adventure

As I have gone through the last six years, I have needed to minimize the effort involved in life maintenance. I need to eat healthy foods, but I also have little energy to spend on cooking. Some weeks are finger-food weeks—a lot of carrots, hummus, hard-boiled eggs. The rest of my life revolves around one-pot meals, eaten as many nights in a row as they last. Chili. Stir fry. Spaghetti squash. When served over rice, these one-dish wonders last twice as long.

And, when the food turns out, this is a great thing. I can cook on a Sunday and not have to cook again for another week or two.

But when things don’t go so well, it’s a different story. Lately, I’ve been craving macaroni and cheese a lot. Sometimes at work, I’ll go to the Slow Cooker section of allrecipes.com and just stare at the pictures of this glorious all-American food. Which, by the way, is not on my diet. That’s how people get cancer.

So I was thrilled when I recently stumbled across a healthy recipe for mac and cheese with great reviews. It substituted pureed squash for most of the cheese, and the stunningly beautiful young mom who posted it insisted that, “This is the only macaroni my 4-year-old will eat.” 4-year-olds like breaded dinosaur-shaped chicken. I like breaded dinosaur-shaped chicken. I figured this couldn’t be half bad.

What I did wrong, I’ll never know. Perhaps it was my addition of fresh green peas to make it just that much healthier. Perhaps it was the substitution of 51% whole wheat pasta for the white pasta. Whatever the case, this mac and cheese was grainy and bland; it would never have qualified for a “Company Dish” in the South. Even the cat wasn’t impressed. But every night when I got home from work at 7 PM, it was either nasty pasta or open a can of condensed milk. It took a week, but I did manage to choke most of the stuff down with the help of copious amounts of salt.

Despite the apparent health-benefits of this vegetable-filled meal, I still have depression. But one thing in my life has improved: I can't remember the last time I craved mac and cheese.