Jobs, moving, sickness, four-month-old baby: STILL time to cook?

Extending Our Table to a New Apartment

Ben and Heather Kulp’s 6-week challenge to cook from
Extending the Table Cookbook.

We have written a great deal about transitions going on in our lives over the past few months, and how they affect our eating habits.  As we look forward to this next week, Heather moves into a new position at her current job and we are also moving across town. Returning to a small one bedroom apartment in a younger neighborhood after giving birth to our son no longer seemed to fit our lifestyle. We are moving to a larger apartment in a quieter neighborhood just outside of Boston. While we are excited to start living at a new address, moving is never something to which to look forward. The idea of packing everything in to bags, boxes, and cramming it in to a U-Haul and friend’s cars is enough to make anyone lose their appetite.

As we found during our Lenten journey through More With Less, times of stress, busy schedules, and transitions do not always lend themselves to the best of eating habits.  Even with our resources focused on the cost of the move, it still seems easier to order Thai food and pizza for the next few nights until everything is settled in the new apartment. Due to our Lenten discovery with cooking, we now know that this is a time when we can actually make ourselves less stressed and more fulfilled if we take a few moments to cook at the end of each day.

It never ceases to amaze us what we can find, forgotten, at the back of the fridge. Spare parts of ginger, onion, cabbage, kale, and veggie sausage were among the many forgotten tidbits that we found while searching through the fridge during the initial clean out before packing to move. Good friends were visiting from Chicago and asked if we could go out for Korean food while they were here. Conscious of budget and time, we instead opted to make the Spicy Cabbage Salad/Kimchi (p. 108) from Korea instead.  We enjoyed a night of reminiscing about our younger, slightly more care free times in Chicago before getting married and having a son.  The conversation drifted into the night, and the Spicy Cabbage Salad was definitely the catalyst for the nostalgia for our Chicago days.

The morning after our extended dinner conversation with friends, the coffee was brewing and we were still joking about stories from the night before.  Looking around the kitchen, there was only a smattering of materials with which to make breakfast for our guests.  Heather and I have always loved breakfast in the vein of yogurt and granola, so we looked to the Muesli recipe for breakfast (p. 154 in the previous version of Simply in Season).  It was a fulfilling breakfast for all of us, and the time it took the recipe to settle was another excuse to gather over coffee and conversation.

granola4

Muesli or granola

We were both struck down (literally) with the flu last week, and the lingering effects of the sickness left us tired and not feeling highly motivated to cook.  As the night was foggy and cold in Boston, we both decided that a nice, warm stew was the answer to our question of dinner after our son had been put to bed.  We decided on the Groundnut Stew (p. 250), as it was a favorite of Ben’s when he was younger.  It’s a wonderful dish to add leftovers to, and we had many small bunches of spinach and kale that found their way in to the stew.  It was also rewarding to think that we were using the leftover food for cooking, as it would regrettably be thrown out during the move.  The warmth and time it took to cook the stew calmed both of us down after a long, harrowing day of childcare and work.GroundNutStew

Groundnut Stew

Over the next week we will be looking for more recipes to use as we move in to our new kitchen.  It will be great to use for our menu as we figure out why the yams were moved in a box with the towels, and where the closest grocery store is for our food needs.  Additionally, we will be able to grow a garden at our new apartment, so look for some fresh veggies to pop into our future recipes.

To buy the new edition of Extending the Table with many recipes illustrated with color photos, click here

MennoByte_photoBen Kulp is a cellist, Suzuki cello instructor, and entrepreneur. Heather Scheiwe Kulp is the Clinical Fellow at the Harvard Law School Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program. Along with a son born February 2014, they live in Boston, Massachusetts, and attend the Mennonite Congregation of Boston. Together, they enjoy hiking, listening to live music, and enjoying good food with friends.

Look for their posts each Wednesday thru June 11, under the special series category, Six Weeks with Extending the Table. Or sign up to receive all Mennobytes posts by subscription from the SUBSCRIBE button on the right side of the blog.