Cooking for Wellness

Well, as if our cooking couldn’t get any more challenging, we have added my 89 year old mother-in-law into the mix. Mom has been fading all winter, just getting smaller and more frail and quiet, and “absent,” to the point where she needs someone to come in and bring her a meal and check on her daily. Everyone is pitching in pretty well to help out, but since she lives an hour away it is easiest for us to bring her over for a few days at a time to stay here. We have plenty of room and she always eats and sleeps well here. However, when her visits coincide with Esther’s weekends at home, the cooking challenge suddenly boosts into turbo…it’s like the final stage in Iron Chef.

Mom has the delicate stomach and disappearing sense of smell and taste common to her age, and is used to the simpler American fare of past decades. So what can we cook that will please all the different people in the house this weekend?

Chicken is always good, so we pulled out the poultry for the weekend: Chicken Stir Fry last night, with jasmine rice, Sticky Chicken with garlic mashed potatoes and green beans tonight, and Red Chicken with White Beans for the next week at Camp. Stuffed Peppers for tomorrow so we don’t start growing feathers. And two pans of rhubarb triple berry crisp, one gluten/lactose free, one “normal.” That was a hit all around.

At least it’s a break from the beans!

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Well, Esther, having made it through her first year of college, is working this summer at our church denomination’s Camp and Conference Center, not quite 20 miles away. She is on staff as the Head Counselor, which is a great position for her, since she is such a people-person and has years of experience as camper, Junior Counselor, and Counselor. During the week she lives there, and then comes home Friday evening bearing piles of dirty laundry, to rest up at home before the staff meeting for the next week of camp on Sunday afternoon.

Back in March I got together with the Programs Director at Camp to discuss the food issues. I explained Esther’s difficulties and director said that it would be easy for her to give me a list of the food they would be serving the campers, since they have basically the same menu each week. It is kid-friendly stuff like chicken nuggets and smiley-face fries, juice boxes, pancakes, tacos, spaghetti, and so on. Absolutely not tummy-friendly food for Esther. It was immediately obvious that she could not make do with the obligatory banana halves and oranges at breakfast and the carrot and celery sticks at lunch.

The director was perfectly happy for us to supply food for her Head Counselor, however, and assured us that the cooks would be very cooperative to prepare whatever Esther needed them to do. With a little thought we came up with one breakfast, one lunch, one dinner meal, and various snacks….multiplied by five, and started cooking and packing. Every Friday and Saturday is a marathon of shopping for fresh produce, and cooking. On Sunday we head out to Camp with a cooler packed full and a box of non-perishable foodstuffs. She has her own shelf in the industrial-sized fridge, and a place for her box; her rice steamer is in the kitchen ready for use. She also needs to take her own distilled water for drinking, since she is taking an expensive probiotic formula that we don’t want killed with the Camp’s heavily treated water. When you are outdoors and on the go all week, that means about 4 gallons a week, plus a half gallon of fruit juice.

By the end of the week she is getting a little tired of eating the same thing every day, but then she comes home to a few home-cooked meals and we cook a whole new set of meals for the following week. The cooks at Camp are great, bringing her food to her at the same time the others are eating, and assuring her that it is no inconvenience.

By the end of the weekend I am sick of cooking, though, and it is all I can do to plan menus for us here at home for the week. Never thought I’d see the day when I would say that about cooking!

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