Several people have asked me lately how I find time to cook with a 7 month old baby at home.  The key for me is planning.  Once a week, usually on Thursdays, I sit down and try to plan what we will have for lunches and dinners all week.

This involves figuring out what food we already have and what is on sale. Then I try to plan a week or so worth of meals.  On Fridays or Saturdays I usually go to the store and get food for the entire week.  Having the food already in the house motivates me to use it so it doesn’t go to waste, and I don’t have to make a trip to the store on top of cooking dinner.  We usually cook more complicated meals that will make a lot of leftovers on Saturday or Sunday, and then the meals get easier through the week.  It helps that Jeremy often cooks on the weekends when I am tired of cooking.  A recent menu looked like this:

It can be tough to cook with a baby, but if I allocate twice the time I normally would to a meal for interruptions, feedings, etc, I can usually get dinner finished at a decent hour.  If a meal requires a lot of prep, I’ll go chop vegetables while Jake is napping earlier in the day.  I have also discovered that Jacob actually likes to watch me cook, so i just put him in his high chair and scoot him up near the counter and stove so he can see things boil and crackle.

We don’t always do as well as I’d like sticking to our plan and not eating out, but when we are prepared and have everything ready in my kitchen it motivates me to actually cook and use the food i’ve already purchased.  I like cooking, even with all the planning, because it is rewarding to be able to save our family money and make delcious and healthy meals at the same time.

The recent peanut butter recall really scared me.  Our son Jacob is only 7 months old and isn’t eating peanut butter yet, but will be soon, and peanut butter is one of my favorite foods.  We have been buying our peanut butter from Whole Foods (the grind your own honey roasted), so when I heard about the recall I naively thought that our peanut butter would be safe.   I checked the recall list a couple of weeks ago and the peanut butter we’ve been buying wasn’t on there, but i checked back a few days ago, and it too had been added to the list.

It is really frustrating that even Whole Foods’ peanut butter was affected by the recall.  I went to their website and only some stores were affected but they did not provide a list of which ones.  I’ve already eaten all of the peanut butter we had, so I have not contacted our store to ask them if it was tainted.  I find it surprising that Whole Foods peanut butter came from the same source as all of the generic peanut butter.  In Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan talks about industrial organic and how it is not too different from regular food because it is highly processed.  My peanut butter wasn’t organic, but, probably stupidly, I had assumed it would be of higher quality than typical peanut butter because it was from Whole Foods who claims to be “Selling the Highest Quality Natural & Organic Products.”

I wish that I could get local peanut butter.  We found one place that makes peanut butter locally, but they too get their peanuts from somewhere in the south, I don’t think they were affected by the recall, but it could just be one of the 100s of items that hasn’t been added yet.  The list is now up to over 2,000 items, some of which you wouldn’t think would contain peanuts or peanut butter, so go check frequently any snack items you have in your pantry.  To me, this is just one more reason to eat our food as local and unprocessed as possible.  If you know of a good and reliable source of peanut butter (and one that doesn’t have partially hydrogenated oils), please let me know, I am looking for one, even if it is not local!