by Roger McEwan
KEEPING OUT OF THE KITCHEN
The alternatives to home-cooked meals all have drawbacks. I refuse to raise my children on junk food. So we watched Supersize Me and The Men that Made Us Fat together so I could educate them on the perils of a junk-food diet. The look on their faces when Morgan Spurlock vomited his lunchtime quarter-pounder and fries out the car window was priceless. That scene has saved me hundreds of dollars and given my two a healthier future. Thanks for your sacrifice, Morgan, as that clearly wasn’t trick photography.
We aren’t saints, however. I do buy takeaways, and Friday has become known as pizza night. I try to keep junk food purchases to once a week but it isn’t a hard and fast rule. We once had pizza three nights in succession – some weeks can be tough as a single parent, or any parent for that matter. The children thought it was great but I felt as if I was failing as a parent (though I struggle to put pizza and Indian takeaways in the same category as the multinational burger chains. That would be like calling alcohol a drug).
Restaurants are an option but that is no more than once a week at most as it’s an expensive method of avoiding the kitchen. It wouldn’t be as costly if the children and I didn’t have drinks, entrées and desserts, but once I’m in a restaurant I’m resigned to the cost. A bonus is that we sit at a table and interact. It’s not that we never sit at our dining table at home, but it’s often simpler to plonk down on the couch and watch TV. The News or America’s Favourite Home Disasters That People Filmed When They Should Have Been Intervening, depending on who finds the remote. I prefer that we sit at the table as I get to hear what’s going on in the children’s world. I have them captured for a whole fifteen minutes.
Takeaways and restaurants aren’t the only options at the disposal of the thinking single dad who wants to avoid cooking. I’ve developed some routines that I judge as win-win, but I know it’s the children and I who are the major beneficiaries. In particular on Monday evenings we visit my mum who loves having us over for dinner. Honestly, she does and the children love the roasts she cooks with vegetables and lashings of gravy.
Between pizza night, Monday at Mum’s and one night dining out, I’ve covered three nights without having to set foot in the kitchen. Not bad. In a moment of inspiration I trimmed two more nights in a win-win-win arrangement with the children. I increased their chore-money on the proviso that they cook one evening meal and organise one breakfast each week. They win because they get cash, and I win for obvious reasons. It took a while for me to get the full benefit as they needed my help in the kitchen, but it was still a win because cooking with the children is fun. The third group of yet to be identified winners are their future flatmates and partners. Each year Rog and Liv will have cooked twenty-six meals and by the time they leave home they’ll have a solid culinary repertoire. Rog tests this logic because he always wants to make tacos. Still, I’ve had far worse meals than tacos in my student days and they’re fairly healthy.
Combining meals is a favoured weekend tactic of mine that lessens kitchen time. If I can withstand the complaints or the children sleep in, which they do more now, I can skip breakfast and we can have brunch. I do hear the odd rumble that they’re being ripped off a meal. The rumblings threatened to escalate into open revolt when I invented ‘brunchner’, which is breakfast, lunch and dinner, and ‘dinnerfast’, dinner and breakfast. I’ve yet to have the courage to implement these.
MEALS FOR ONE
When the children are with me food provides an almost audible beat that keeps life moving. The pantry and fridge must be stocked and meals whisked up at a reasonable time if you want the world to spin smoothly. Without the children and their entreating, cajoling and nagging, there’s no such impetus and consequently my kitchen rapidly resembles a hotel room containing coffee, tea, alcohol, chips and chocolate. I’m exaggerating slightly, it’s not too bad at the start of the week.
I do find cooking for one is wholly uninspiring but, that said, I try and cook a couple of times a week to keep the bills down and my health up. I aim for quick and easy meals as I see no point in trying to prepare an intricate meal when I’m most likely to be watching the News. So it’s tried and true meals like steak and salad, burger and chips or sometimes a roast if there’s compelling sport on TV.
On rare occasions I try to be creative. On my way home one Friday after a few convivial drinks, I caught the distinctive and delicious smell of curry. Homer-like – Homer Simpson that is – my brain said ‘Hmmm, curried sausages’ and so I stopped at the supermarket and purchased the required ingredients. I knew the dish wasn’t complex or time consuming and I soon settled down on the couch with a heaped plate of curried sausages and rice. They looked fantastic, although they weren’t as yellow as I remembered.
One bite had me reaching for a drink to wash away the taste.
I’d made mustard sausages, not curried ones.
In my defence the tins and powders do look similar. I was gutted, though it highlighted the dangers of trying to follow a recipe post-beer. I wandered down to the local Indian takeaways for a real curry as Tiger, my late cat, tucked into the sausages. He died of old age – not the sausages.
On solo nights when I decide to shun the kitchen I buy what I consider to be healthy takeaways such as a kebab or Indian. I also drop into my mum’s on an ad-hoc basis where my side of the conversation goes something like:
‘Hi Mum.’
‘Only if you’ve got enough.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Is there any beer in the fridge?’
As Liv has grown she has sweetly taken to helping me in my solo weeks. She likes cooking on Sunday night and makes a big dish of lasagne or macaroni cheese ensuring I have leftovers for at least two nights, sometimes three. It’s very thoughtful and it has shown me how much children can be in tune with the subtleties of the world around them.
One Sunday, as I was packing the car in preparation to drop the children off, Liv, who was around ten, suddenly became tearful. I had no idea why and so I sat with her and we chatted. What emerged was quite lovely. Because I was going to be by myself for the week she thought that I’d be sad and lonely. In my usual dad style, I assured her that dropping off her and Rog for the week was a joyous event. It wasn’t long after this that Liv started cooking the big Sunday meals.
One aspect that is noticeable when the children are absent is that the standards of hygiene in the kitchen are significantly lowered. With the children around I keep the kitchen spotless so they don’t see it as a place where they can dump and run. Without them leftovers, dishes and food packaging pile up on the bench and in the sink. Plates and cutlery are reused with a cursory wipe of the dishcloth. The odd food item will have been left out overnight to become a simple, quick breakfast. Anyway, I think it’s a crime to waste good pizza.
The lengths to which my standards can be lowered was highlighted to me by a stuffed potato. I’d bought it on the way home after the gym and heated it in the microwave. As I was transferring it to a waiting plate – lined with salad I may add – the paper on which it was sitting ripped and it literally splatted on the kitchen floor. I was devastated. It was late, I was tired, I was hungry and the cupboards were bare. Now, there’s no way in the world I would allow the children to eat anything that had hit the kitchen floor in that manner, but …
I think cooking and eating are activities that are at their finest when there are other adults involved. When you’re single, with or without children, it’s harder to find the motivation to aim for haute cuisine. Maybe there’s a market for a reality TV programme focused on cooking for one. It would suit an alcoholic chef with only average standards and there must a few of them around.
I’m definitely in Storm’s camp though. Life is too short to stuff a mushroom.
Reflections
When cooking for children, serve food they’re likely to eat the vast majority of the time. It saves you crying into yo
ur penne all’arrabbiata.
Real life and cooking shows are mutually exclusive. It’s all down to smoke, mirrors and about twenty assistants.
Educating your children on the dangers of a poor diet will save you money and will improve everyone’s future health.
Teaching children to cook will get you out of the kitchen and, if you insist on variety, arm them with a repertoire for their future.
Cooking and eating alone isn’t often fun. Aim for quick, easy and healthy.
Have a dinner plan B when cooking after a few drinks.
9. Domesticity
The cruel irony of housework: people only notice when you don’t do it.
Danielle Raine (writer)
A single parent’s chores seem endless. There’s always a long, cyclical list of domestic duties waiting. I’m sure it’s the same for parents in general, especially where one parent shoulders the domestic workload. And, let’s be honest, it’s usually the mother, despite her working arrangements. It may not be politically correct to say, but it’s usually viewed as woman’s work. Wrongly! It’s thankless, unnoticed and mostly unrewarding work. I say ‘mostly’ as I find the result of vacuuming rather pleasing. That aside, as tasks they rank below cooking and above jamming my finger in the door. Just.
In the absence of the ability to delegate, keeping the house clean is difficult on two fronts. First, there’s when the children are with me. They have an amazing capacity to make everything messy. It’s an innate gift that they’ll lose when they have children of their own. Some children, mostly boys I’m disappointed to say, never lose this ability and usually elect to marry their way into a tidier environment. They should come with warnings.
Second, there’s when I am on my own. Then I can’t be bothered cleaning as usually there’s no one but me to benefit. The chapter on single dads and friends will give you a better understanding why my chances of unexpected visitors are remote, allowing laxness to reign.
THE CHILDREN ARE IN DA HOUSE
Let’s take the weeks with the children first. There is nothing that they touch that stays clean or tidy. You name it: shoes, clothes, their rooms, the coffee table, the kitchen, their desks, the floor, not to mention the bathroom and toilet. It defies logic that they can make a mess with soap and toothpaste – two products whose sole purpose is to make things cleaner!
Food, in particular, can be slopped, spilled, dropped, dribbled and left anywhere. Frequently I find freshly and hurriedly wiped spills on the carpet or table. The giveaway is that it’s a child’s attempt to clean the minor disaster and it’s a lacklustre effort at best. It’s no wonder that pets love children. They are walking food distributors. Cathy recounted a story in which she’d brought a brand-new couch. On the first day it was in the house, her daughter let a fried egg slide off her plate and onto the armrest. All Cathy was able to say was ‘I can’t believe you did that!’
That’s the way the world turns when children are in the house. I have given up on the concept of a stain-free carpet. There’s no point in having such a lofty goal. Go into any house and you can work out how many children live there, and their ages, by a quick glance at the carpet in front of the TV and heaters. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes.
‘Two, I think you’ll find, Watson. A boy and, if I’m not mistaken, a girl who has an aversion to vegetables. One or both are missing fingers or suffering from a malady that causes a severe shaking of the limbs. That or a tribe of African green monkeys have moved in. It could be either.’
I beg, threaten and, more recently, incentivise – but it appears to be impossible for Rog or Liv to keep areas clean and tidy. I wouldn’t mind if the mess was contained in their rooms, but they invade as many spaces as possible. When they were little we did what all parents do: we followed them from room to room, cleaning up in their wake. Each morning they woke to an environment that was clean and ordered with everything in its proper place. This has clearly had a deep psychological impact as although they now know that cleaning and tidying are not naturally occurring phenomena, they carry on as if they were. I’m sure they wonder why I got rid of their self-making beds.
Keeping their clothes tidy and organised is a particular nightmare, at least for me. Let me paint a picture as Rog and Liv have developed their own approach.
Liv’s room, above the waist, is pretty and serene. Pink (the actual colour is strangely named Fruitlands Quarter) with a crimson (Napier) feature wall. Teddy bears lounge in and dangle from a cargo net in the corner. But from waist down, it is a different story.
Liv prefers the floordrobe approach to clothes management. She sprinkles her clothes in a gentle, snow-like pattern lightly covering the carpet, bean bag, the end of her bed and any other flat surface. These clothes are not all destined for the washing basket, which stands empty an entire two metres from her door. No, many clothes will be reused. Her white – and that’s a liberal use of the word – school socks are draped elegantly on her bean bag. She usually only brings one pair with her each week despite my constant nagging (yes, I can nag with the best of them) to bring all her clothes each week. These socks will be worn for five days. There’s a pleasant thought for her schoolmates and teachers.
Near the enormous pile of stuffed toys, all those that couldn’t fit in the cargo net, lie her favourite jeans. They are inside out with the underwear, Superman-like, still in place. She’ll wear them again at the weekend, and the underwear, as nearly happened once, may fall out on her travels. That’s a good look for a young lady.
Moving to Rog’s room, it’s eclectic which suits his personality. A large piano dominates one wall and shelves of models another. On the shelves are a range of toys and games unopened from previous birthdays and Christmas as well as a one-tenth completed replica of the Titanic. No problem with closure there.
Rog has mastered the clothing mountain. Do you remember the scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind when Richard Dreyfuss builds his own replica of the Devil’s Tower in his lounge? That’s Rog’s clothes. For those who haven’t seen the movie, tip a full washing basket upside down. Perfect. Mixed together in his mound are clothes that are clean, dirty, some in between waiting to be re-worn and some that should be fumigated.
To my frustration, Rog enjoys the benefit of pockets. For him, and I suspect many boys, they are a cross between a rubbish bin and treasure trove. The amount of bric-a-brac I find is alarming enough, but it’s the stuff that I miss that’s the real problem. This I usually discover after I’ve done the washing – and a ruined load of washing is a particularly dispiriting experience. It sucks the joy out of life. Without delving into the reasons why, I’ve noticed that washing seems to be an exclusively feminine affair. I’ve certainly never heard a male exclaim at the start of a downpour, ‘Shit, I’ve got the washing out.’ Apart from myself that is.
When the children arrived for the week I used to lovingly put their clothes away for them. Then, on the following Sunday, I would empty all the drawers, add the washed clothes and put everything in neatly ordered piles so they could check and pack. Now they’re old enough, beginning roughly from when Rog started high school, I have passed this responsibility to them. This now makes looking in their drawers a depressing experience and so I try not to. Mangled is the only way to describe their style of folding.
I used to police the putting away of clothes, but I lost faith after the following exchange with Rog:
‘You’re not putting them away like that are you?’ I said in disbelief.
‘What way?’ Rog said, holding an arm full of clothes.
‘You’re missing the point of the exercise. Don’t do it,’ I said as I watched Rog move towards his chest of drawers.
‘Do what?’ He knew what.
‘Don’t. Do. It.’
‘My McDonald’s will get cold,’ Rog replied as though that somehow made his intended action legitimate. I made a mental note to get Supers
ize Me out again. Then with a grin and the slightest shrug of his shoulders, Rog rammed his clothes into the drawer as if he was stuffing a cushion. I watched as he repeated the exercise until his suitcase was empty. There wasn’t even any effort to keep like clothes together. Socks and shirts in the same drawer, how does that even work?
When he had finished, he stood up, smiling.
‘If you look scruffy and unkempt, it’s not my fault,’ I said, shaking my head.
Rog again shrugged his shoulders.
‘At least I’ll know when you get your first girlfriend.’ This time I’m smiling and Rog is wearing a confused look.
‘You’ll start being fussier with your clothes.’
The difficulty my children have changing the toilet roll sums up their ability to keep things ordered and tidy. To me, changing the toilet roll is a simple task and I’ve had this chat with them on multiple occasions. If the toilet roll is empty, you change it and put the empty roll in the recycling. That’s all there is to it. In all my years as a single dad they haven’t fully completed this task.
I have deciphered the logic they’re using.
If they use the last of the roll, they leave the empty roll in place. They must feel lucky that there was just enough left for them. Hopefully.
If they find that the toilet roll is empty then they use the other toilet. They make it the next person’s problem.
If this isn’t possible as the other toilet is occupied or worse, and both toilet rolls are empty, then they take a new roll from the container I conveniently keep filled. But after use, they perch it on the empty roll or place it on top of the cistern.
If they feel like helping me out, they replace the toilet roll but leave the empty roll on top of the new roll or discard it under the bath for me to find and recycle it in a few months’ time.