🌮

I have the intention to make dinner each night.
I totally intend to open my recipe book and choose a soul-satisfying meal to create.
Then it doesn’t happen.
And I kind of judge myself.
Maybe I’m not a good mom because making dinner isn’t my favorite.

So I intend to do it again.
I pull out my recipe binder and mark a few choices for the week.
I make a grocery list.
Sometimes I even buy the ingredients.
But it still doesn’t happen consistently.
I sigh. I feel tired. I wonder why I can’t pull it together to be a dinner-cooking mom.

Instead, I brown a couple of pounds of ground turkey and add some taco seasoning.
We eat that all week – tacos, taco salad, quesadillas, breakfast burritos.
I might throw in some grilled cheese one night.
Or BLTs now that the tomatoes are on.
All favorites. But nothing new. Not much variation. And the recipe book sits closed. With all its good intentions trapped inside.

Cooking for three was not easy.
Jason ate like a bird and was picky.
We basically could feed our whole family on one-and-a-half servings.
It’s hard to make one-and-a-half servings of stuff.
Now there’s even less of us.
Cooking is still not easy for me.

But.
I was at my sister-in-law’s this weekend and she had her recipe book out.
A 1-inch binder with no more than a few dozen recipes. Fan favorites.
The tried and true.
The ones they always came back to.

Then, if she wants to try something new, she makes it and decides if it’s worthy of going in the book.
No piles of “intention” recipes hanging around her kitchen.
No “I intend to cook that.”
No “I intend to love that next time.”
No “I intend to keep this recipe for five years without ever choosing to make it.”

I was inspired.
I purged my recipe notebook today.
Moved from a 2-inch binder down to the 1-inch version.
Just our favorites.
The things I’m willing to make right now.
I’ll add to it if the recipe is worthy of hanging onto.
No intentions necessary.
And no self-judgment. No criticism for another night of delicious BLTs. No sighing or shaming for not making some new masterpiece from my book.

Just a cleaned-out recipe book waiting for me to be ready to use it. Whenever I feel like it.
Yes, tacos are included.🌮