Cooking for one
On empty nesting and learning to feed myself again.
Happy Sunday, Midlifers,
For Mother’s Day, I’m resharing an older essay from my early empty nest era — back when I was still wandering around Costco buying family-sized bags of produce for children who no longer lived at home.
At the time, everything felt so different and slightly disorienting. Reading it now, I can see I was grieving a little, even while feeling proud and excited for my kids.
The post is on the longer side so you might have to click over to Substack to read the whole thing.
Also, I still maintain that cooking elaborate meals for one person is depressing.
Happy Mother’s Day, friends.
My friend Maggie texted on Friday to say that it would be a beautiful weekend for apple picking, and my first thought was: who is even eating apples? I said that to another girlfriend over breakfast yesterday to celebrate her birthday, joking that if I went, I’d give her all my apples since I don't have anyone living at home anymore to help eat them. "Make a pie," she suggested, and I told her that making a pie for one person would be way too sad.
Since my two youngest kids moved out this summer, my meals have consisted of smoothies and these fancy pretzel-coated chicken nuggets I get from an equally fancy takeout place in town. I heat them up in my air fryer three at a time and between them and going out to dinner and leftovers, I haven’t actually cooked anything in weeks. I baked some fancy store-bought cookies in the oven to bring to a potluck on Friday night and think it was the first time I’d used my oven since August. In just two months I’ve gone from a regular consumption of greens, healthy grains and protein to eating like a 5-year-old boy.
When all four kids were home during the pandemic, we ate like we were auditioning for our own Food Network show, and it was a lot of work. Luckily, my younger daughter was game (for a while), so the two of us would strategize elaborate meal plans (dinner and lunch) and go out to Wegman’s and Costco at least once a week to forage for everything we’d need.
We produced lovely grain bowl bars for lunch, where everyone could choose to layer on top of their farro base, say, roasted sweet potatoes and broccoli, and some shredded chicken or an easy-over egg. Sometimes my daughter would make a hummus sauce we could drizzle on top of the whole thing.
She and I also made a million frittatas during that long, hunker-down stretch, and filled it with things in the frig – dollops of ricotta and chopped hot cherry peppers. Maybe some chopped spinach and bacon or leftover sausage. We’d make a big salad to go along with it, often a big mix from Costco that was just the right size for all of us.
Looking for other projects to fill our time last spring, my daughter and I (but mostly, her) built a raised garden bed to try our hand at being farmers. We planted a couple each of cucumbers, zucchini, banana peppers, and tomatoes and harvested veggies to add to our menus through October and into early November. The cucumbers climbed out of the bed and up onto the deck behind it where big, fat cukes hung from the railing and slept on the steps, and at one point zucchini leaves took over the small bed.
We made lots of zucchini noodles that we mixed with pesto and laid long slices brushed with oil on the grill. We chopped the banana peppers and put them in mason jars and covered them in vinegar and pulled them out of the frig to add to salads and frittatas.
But the tomatoes were our true prize. I couldn’t even tell you what varieties we grew but they were big and fat. I’d interviewed farmers around the state for an article I wrote in the summer and learned that you can pick tomatoes as soon as you start to see a blush and put them on your windowsill to finish ripening and this prevents them from taking in too much water and cracking. I waited until my eight or so tomatoes were red and then blanched and peeled them and made Marcella Hazan’s classic fresh tomato sauce recipe a few times, that’s just butter, onion and the tomatoes.
Before my youngest daughter moved out of my basement to Philly in July, she built a second garden bed this spring, which we dedicated just to tomatoes. I don’t even know what we were thinking back in May when buying all that lumber and bags of soil seemed like a good idea. Because now, with only me and a dog here, I have had to give so many tomatoes away. In fact, I don’t even like tomatoes all that much, especially the hundreds of grape tomatoes I’ve gathered in a plastic bowl to dole out to friends. I have been toasting a slice of sourdough bread for lunch a few days a week and smashing some avocado on top and covering it with big red slices of beefsteaks, drizzled with a little olive oil and some salt and pepper. That is a pretty dang perfect lunch.
A few months ago, I was horrified to discover that the pack of deer that roam the neighborhood had found my bed this year and mowed down anything that grew over the chicken wire fence. I went to Lowe’s and bought bird netting to zip tie on top, but eventually, the plants grew through the netting, and the deer nibbled at that and now I’ve just thrown my hands up. Imagine how many more tomatoes I’d have to be vigilantly harvesting to give away, were it not for those annoying deer.
In the end, I made myself go apple picking instead of staying home on the most perfect fall day and working on my laptop like a weirdo. I met Maggie and her sister out by the apple orchards where we went first for a long walk at a nearby park and took a little detour to explore the woods on a dirt path that led to a little point jutting into the reservoir. The leaves are still green and we looked across the water and agreed we needed to return in a month to see how the vista will have changed in that time.
We drove to the orchards that were packed – the fields full of cars with lots of New York plates – but it’s so big it never seemed like, say, the mall at Christmas. Maggie pulled our plastic cart and we determined what varieties we wanted and roamed the aisles that had that vinegary apple smell. Any time I’d ever gone apple picking in the past, it was always too late in the season to really find anything left in the trees. But yesterday was the perfect day, with so many perfect pieces of fruit to choose from still clustered in the trees, that I couldn’t stop picking until the handles of the plastic bag I was handed when I went through the orchard’s entrance could just stretch far enough to be knotted together when I was done.
The whole time standing in line to pay at one of the shacks lined up in the field manned by distracted teenagers, we could smell the donuts and shared stories about apple picking excursions with children from long ago and the cider and donuts at the end. To me, apple picking was something you did with your kids. You’d pluck too many apples, buy too many pumpkins and eat sugary donuts, then bring it all home and figure out what to do with it all while feeling sick to your stomach from all the sugar.
We waited in the long line for donuts and cider yesterday, and they were not worth sticking around for the extra 20 minutes, they were so oily and had barely any sugar. Sometimes it's better to just stick to memories of perfect donuts.
My birthday friend popped over after I got home and I gave her half my apples but saved some for this week, when that youngest daughter is coming home to see a Jonas Brothers concert with her long-time, JoBros-loving friend. She’ll be here for two nights and I can’t wait. I have so many tomatoes and apples to share with her.
This has been the longest stretch I've ever gone without seeing any one of my four children, and it's been so strange. I know as women we are encouraged not to just be mothers. We're supposed to be a lawyer, and a mom, or a political activist, and a mom. But while identifying as just a mom for a very long time might not have been the best career move for me, in the end, my children saved me. Being their mother helped make me a much better person than I was on course to become. Less selfish. More patient. And they taught me what it meant to love four people wholly unconditionally. That has been revelatory.
With everyone gone now and me with this new big and demanding job where I'm as old as probably half my colleagues' own mothers, my life could not be more different. Right now it's not better, and it's not worse, it's just so, so very different than it was for almost 30 years.
So this week, I will show my love to my daughter in one of the best ways I know how — through food. We'll eat fresh tomato sauce from our garden and follow it up with a warm apple crumble topped with scoops of vanilla ice cream and for a little while, I'll enjoy just being her mom.
What I’m reading
I listened to RF Kuang’s Yellowface last week for my baby book club (we are just four strangers who are slowly getting to know each other over dinner each month). It’s about the publishing industry and loneliness and who has the right to tell someone’s story. The book sparked a ton of discussion, which is always a good sign to me.
What I’d send a sick friend
I still felt really crappy this week — on Wednesday I even signed off at lunchtime and took to my couch for the rest of the afternoon (I’ve made it to Season Six of Girls). At some point, I noticed a box sitting outside my front door and soon learned it was a chicken soup meal sent to me by my friend, Kelly. Reader: it was just the hug I needed. It’s from Spoonful of Comfort and came with the soup, rolls, cookies and a cute little ladle and I ate it for three meals. Highly recommend.
Happy Mother’s Day!
xoAmy
Hope you loved the Sweet Bee Bakeshop cookies!