Cooking Simply

My stomach has been off lately. I’ve actually always had trouble with my stomach. Now that I know I grew up with constant anxiety, it explains why I took so many antacids as a kid, had so many stomach aches, vomiting episodes, mostly stress-induced. My son is having them now. It was only recently that I clued onto the idea of drinking water to soothe the rats in my guts instead of just nibbling on some sort of snack to absorb the excess acid.

When I get down or depressed, my eating tapers off as I lose my appetite, until I’m really just minimally snacking to get through the day. This causes its own issues with the digestive tract. I try to force myself to eat, but cooking feels like a chore, and most processed foods seem unappealing. Even when I start to expand and come out of the contraction, my system is off and I feel weak and nauseous.

I invested in a rice cooker and an air fryer for my apartment, and I’ve been really enjoying making this Air-Fried Tofu recipe I found. Cooking rice and steaming vegetables in the rice cooker while it steams has been pretty easy, and suddenly there’s food in the fridge to nibble on. That works for me, but what about the boys?

It’s mostly been nuggets or pizza lately. It’s hard to find something that they will eat between the two of them. One of the reasons I got the air fryer was to be able to quickly and easily air-fry fish fillets, but it turns out only one of us really enjoys that. Trying to get their input on what to make them led us into this blind alley of frozen pizzas, chicken nuggets, and popcorn shrimp. What I did learn is that they don’t really care about variety. While I’d been working with the assumption that a menu has to be mixed up and rotating, that may have been false. I’m finding I really only want to make and eat one dish. The boys would happily continue eating nuggets and pizzas.

But there’s an option that I’m going to try. They both like sushi. I don’t, but I don’t mind rolling sushi for them for dinner. We also found recipes for tofu katsu and chicken katsu that we can make in the air fryer. I’m already mapping out how I can use the excess from my meal to create theirs. Also miso udon soup was floated, which I didn’t realize can become an entree onto itself. So we might be cooking Japanese around here for a while.