In The Fourth Trimester, we ask parents: What meal nourished you after welcoming your baby? This month it’s saucy stir-fried mushrooms from author Daniel Lavery.
A few years ago the three of us—Lily, Grace, and self—decided to have a baby together. Lily introduced the idea to the floor, Grace and I unanimously seconded the motion, and baby Rocco appeared more or less shortly thereafter. At present his diet is mostly milk, although from time to time he will condescend to be presented with a fragment of grated apple or swipe of yogurt. His demeanor in such moments is one of lordly courtesy: I shall permit you to make me a gift of this impedimenta, since you seem so bent upon it. But it is to please you, and not myself, that I do it. As a result, mealtime is probably the aspect of our shared life that has been the least altered by his arrival.
Our biggest challenge is that we are all old first-time parents, each with very decided ideas about what we like to eat, and when. Collectively we have over 120 years of ingrained habits that none of us want to alter. Grace can’t eat eggs or dairy and loves a roasted haunch of animal. Lily prefers vegetarian food. I am allergic to shrimp, although this allergy is merely physical (spiritually I can handle it perfectly well). Worse yet, I’m the type who has to eat breakfast within an hour of rising or I start chewing the countertops, and I could happily eat dinner at 5 p.m. or earlier. Meanwhile, Grace and Lily hold a monstrous sort of European attitude towards meals. Breakfast they could either take or leave, and they often leave it. I don’t even want to tell you what time they start talking about making dinner. This is why we share only about one out of every four meals. I suspect eventually we will need to achieve a greater degree of synchronization someday.
Despite our mealtime independence, we’re all concerned with doing our fair share in this postpartum period—Grace and me especially, since Lily did all the child-bearing. Grace goes in for the ambitious home pantry stuff. The counters, windowsills, and half of the back patio are littered with her various fermentation and salt-curing projects (homemade soy sauce, garum, and something that looks like rice but smells of apricot). I’m more inclined toward the role of short-order cook, ready to improvise with whatever happens to be on hand. I have caught myself listing the contents of the refrigerator to the others, as if they weren’t at the store with me when we bought groceries, and I wonder who I think I’m helping: There’s that good tofu behind the corn. Some radishes if you want a salad. I could go get some milk if we were out of milk, but we’re not out of milk.
Lily is normal, both by comparison and in her own right. She bounced back shockingly well from childbirth, and is always taking the baby out on hikes, lashed to her back like a shipping container. Under ordinary circumstances she cooks quite a lot, but in our newfound parenthood, she gets crowded out between my and Grace’s bids for helpful one-upmanship. “I’m making STEW,” I’ll text the group at 9 a.m. And since Grace can’t compete with that directly, she’ll counter with, “Don’t forget—this Sunday I want to have So-and-so over for dinner and roast something in hay,” and so on. I counter with leeks à la Grecque, goulash the color of bricks, pork chops with anchovy butter, zucchini rice, braised cabbage. It’s very simple why: I want to be the baby’s favorite. I want both Lily and Grace to privately think of me as the best one. I want our dogs to always sleep on my feet in bed and nobody else’s. And I want everyone to find this obsession with being adored to be a likable quality in itself, instead of off-putting and suffocating.
Occasionally I remember to turn all this off. In those moments I make something easy, rather than something that only looks easy. Like scrambled eggs, pantry pasta, or stir-fried mushrooms. The latter really is easy. I already have the ingredients 99 percent of the time. Mushrooms please everyone. They’re meaty but suitable for vegetarians, they cook up fast, they taste pleasant and odd, like the earth. I feel good about handing a seared gobbet of mushroom to the baby and watching him wave it around in his fat little fist before scraping it against his eight teeth (four on top, four on bottom). I don’t want to invite anyone over for this dish. It’s not that impressive. But I do want everyone in the house to eat it and be quietly pleased. So quietly pleased that they don’t even have to tell me.
Source link
