Food For Thought: Are Your Pots Too Big?

Dear Friends,
Ever heard of the term “too much”? When it comes to buying food and keeping food in your pantry, fridge, and freezer, we have a tendency to become somewhat pack rattish. What we need to do is refocus and look at our needs, not our peculiar desire to shove food into every nook and cranny of the kitchen. That’s the keyword: need. We’re all guilty of “too much” I know this is true, I’ve seen your pantries!

We buy too much food; we end up cooking too much food and then throwing too much out! It doesn’t matter if we have a family of 1 or a family of 8, there is this tendency for SHE’s to have too much of everything—including leftovers. And we all know what happens to leftovers left in the fridge for weeks on end. Big yuck.

There is a phenomenon that happens once you become an empty nester that can really break the bank.

Think about it; for years, you’ve cooked too much for the family, and now to have to cut down the too much to just TWO, it can make your brain bleed! You feel like you’ve got no food in the house, that you’re cooking for Barbies, not people! The little skillet and the little saucepan are so petite and demure! You miss those big old skillets that require heavy lifting with two hands. You miss buying the beans in bulk and the big bags of rice. Good grief, this tiny cooking feels like starvation, LOL!

The deal is we’ve been conditioned to super size with the needs of our growing families, but now it’s time to downsize. It’s not just cutting a recipe in half but also cutting back on the groceries, the cooking implements, and what have you. It’s relearning how to do something all over again.

But here’s the deal. We need to FEEL it to do it. Why, because we’re women and that’s how we roll, LOL.

Big pots just FEEL better than little ones, for me anyway. I don’t know why, but they do.

Cooking for me is nurturing and loving my family. And when you do it in big pots, it’s literal big love that you’re dishing out. So when you give me little pots, you’re taking away my ability to nurture and love! At least that was how I was unknowingly equating this “tiny cooking” with until I realized, nothing is going away, I’m just cooking less!

So again, it’s back to MINDSET. What does cooking large really mean? What does it communicate? How does it make you feel? Do you feel like you’re “skimping” on love because you have to scale back your cooking? Do you feel like less of a mom, wife, or woman? I know this sounds loony, but honestly, we connect so deeply with what we DO; this is how we’re identified so when our own identifications need to shift, we feel lost.

Spatulas up ladies! It’s time to get a new pair of wings and take flight! Our FLYing hasn’t changed, our flight path has. It’s still FLYing, it’s just different! Let’s celebrate this rather than fight it or feel sorry for ourselves and less populated nests. Life is good, full, and yes, different!
Love,
Leanne Ely, Your Dinner Diva
Still Saving Your Dinner for 11 years

PS–You can receive delicious menus (complete with shopping lists for 2!) delivered right to your email inbox by subscribing to Dinner Answers today!