Eating Out

I'm coming around to realizing how much money I've been wasting eating out. Also, my son is so keen on learning to cook, he never wants to eat out anymore. He wants to stay home and learn to cook.

I had a few unbelievable experiences this week with cooking at home.

Last Friday night I taught him how to make a classic French vinaigrette dressing -- vinegar, oil, mustard, garlic, spices. He was so excited about being able to throw the stuff together -- as I've written before, I wonder if I have a chef on my hands here.

He made a batch and insisted on saving it in the fridge that evening. Not a small batch.

Saturday morning I wake to the smell of vinaigrette dressing. He's up at 6:00am, making MORE of it, all his ingredients lined up on the counter. The boy is really into cooking.

Meanwhile, yesterday, before he got home from school at noon (my kid's elementary school has a half day every Thursday -- working moms be damned) I was knocking around the kitchen trying to decide what to make him for lunch. I had a surplus of eggs, so I thought I'd hard boil a few.

I got the eggs cooked and made up a batch of egg salad -- which I make more like deviled eggs (w/mustard and vinegar again) and had it ready to make him an egg salad sandwich when he came home.

Thing is, I made the big mistake of tasting some myself. It was so good. I nearly flipped. Such a simple thing and just so damned good. Plain homemade food is hard to beat. I had forgotten how good plain old egg salad can be.

This is another funny thing that's been happening with him and me. He is in that "MOM YOU'RE THE BEST COOK IN THE WHOLE WORLD" thing lately when I made something completely simple and, to my mind, boring. It's touching, but it seems a gigantic 9-year old histrionic overreaction. What he really loves (and so do I) is spending all the time in the kitchen together learning to cook and having fun.

I made grilled cheese with bacon that he was over the moon for. I also had him try some of his vinaigrette on fresh steamed green beans this week and he was cramming them in his mouth like candy. (Reminds me of how much I love these.) And boiled red baby potatoes with butter and salt -- you've have thought it was caviar or something.

Whatever the case, I'm finding the combination of simple fresh food, cooked in a simple way to be so much more delicious than most of the food I was getting when I was rather distractedly eating out all the time, it's hard to compare the two.