My mother was a gourmet cook, so I grew up eating creative, nutritious meals—from scratch. She often sat at the kitchen table looking for recipes in her ladies’ magazines. “Listen to this,” she’d say, reading the list of ingredients. “Doesn’t that sound good?”
“Sure,” I’d say, wondering how she could tell just from a list of ingredients whether something would taste good? She never hesitated to try something new. “What is that smell?” my father said one night when he came home from work. He was grinning; my brother and I were holding our noses. “Shrimp curry!” Mom said.
A few years later, as a young adult, I came home to visit my parents and noticed Mom taking frozen dinners out of the freezer. I was shocked and judgmental. “How could she compromise her standards this way?” I thought. Now, as an old adult, I get it. I really get it.
Sometimes I’m brave enough to say out loud, “I’m so tired of cooking.” And I’m stunned at how many women agree, women who always seemed so capable and contented in the kitchen. “I’m not only tired of cooking,” one said, “but the planning, buying, fixing, serving of meals. I’m over it.”
For my mother, frozen dinners weren’t a compromise. They were a gift.
