Kelsey and I try to split cooking and household chores and parenting duties pretty evenly, give or take. Lately, our toddler has been in a Mommy-only kick where I only exist if, f=rankly, there’s nobody else around, so a lot of the parenting duties have skewed in the past few months. And Kelsey would probably be polite about it and say we have different standards when it comes to cleaning, and whether the laundry needs to actually be folded or if it’s ok being in a heap in the other room as long as you can still just grab whatever you need in the morning, and any time I hang a photo or put something else on the walls, I know to get a second opinion before I show it to her (the dog has gotten real good at “bark once for lower to the left and twice for lower to the right”).
But when it comes to cooking, I think we do a pretty good job of balancing measls between the two of us. She takes the quality meals and I make up my half with quantity (like making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the morning for lunches). Because other than the basics, I’m not much of a cook. And Kelsey’s fantastic, so I’ve been trying to step my game up. That means trying to do more with the Pampered Chef tools she’s filled our kitchen with. Where she thinks of them as, “How can I use this to make food taste even more delicious or to try that new ingredient I’ve never used?”, I see them as, “If I do use this, is it going to be easy to clean”? For example, lately, I’ve been using the quick cooker a lot because I’m not great at remembering to defrost meat before I want to use it — mostly because I’m not great about planning what I want to make ahead of time — and for that I’m very excited.
Pampered Chef helps Kelsey to be a better cook. It helps me to not be any better of a cook than I already am, but still make food my family enjoys eating.
So with that said, I want to start sharing some of my family cooking experience, maybe helping the mediocre cooks in your lives with the lessons I’m learning along the way, and hopefully you’ll want to share some of the lessons from your experience, too.