For my birthday, my requests were as follows:

to not cook
to not teach anyone
to not make chore lists
to not get presents

If they wanted to make me a cake, a cheesecake would be nice, but I really didn’t care what kind of cake it was as long as I wasn’t in charge. I wanted to write for a long time. Also, I wanted to go on a family hike (but not on the actual day since everyone was at school/working and probably not until after the relief sale — so only in theory, I guess; we’ll see if it actually happens) and play Ultimate Frisbee with the kids.

the ultimate 
For the last few weeks, all four of my kids have been playing Ultimate twice a week at the local university. It’s for anyone — just a bunch of pick-up games — and intergenerational.

You should come, Mom, they kept saying, but since it’d been a good twenty years since I’d last played, and I wasn’t even sure I remembered how to catch a frisbee, much less throw one, and because I was afraid I’d sprain an ankle or something, I kept declining.

But then at our church retreat last weekend, I got roped into playing and it turned out to be loads of fun (never mind that I about died from all the running and jumping), so when I realized that the community group would be playing on my birthday, I decided that that’s what I wanted to do to celebrate: play Ultimate with my kids.

(And then my dad showed up, too, so we were three generations, yay us!)

the day
I spent the day writing, and running errands and blogging and basically not thinking about anyone but myself. When I arrived home mid-afternoon, the kids were over at my mom’s, and the house, I noticed, was spotless.

Hm, they must’ve cleaned, I thought. Nice.

Later that night after the kids had all gone up to bed, I found this:

and my jaw dropped, bless their little hearts. (Also, apparently I’m not the only one who knows how to make a list.)

the supper
Cheese, crackers, pickles, fruit, meats, and two boxes of Captain Crunch.

I couldn’t have been happier.

then, the cake 
I knew it wasn’t going to be a cheesecake, since my favorite cheesecake has to be made 24 hours in advance and no one appeared to be preparing anything ahead of time (as they are wont to do). But I didn’t much care; just not having to think about anything was gift enough.

But! Supper over, they made me cover my eyes and presented me with a wee baby chocolate cake, which didn’t fool me for a second — no one goes to the trouble of mixing up only a wee bit of cake batter. And sure enough, then the real cake appeared.

Three layers, and each layer brazenly and extravagantly studded, sprinkled, piled, and armoured in candy, with a jauntly red ribbon wrapped round the bottom layer. I couldn’t get over it. It was utterly spectacular.

They eagerly filled me in on the details: how my younger daughter had made the cakes and my older daughter had bought an obscene amount of candy. How they’d taken everything to my parents’ house (my parents weren’t at home) and set up their cake shop there. How they’d printed off plans from the internet and measured and calculated and chopped and iced and decorated, all working together.

That, plus the candy, made it pretty much the sweetest cake ever.

This same time, years previous: hey-hey! look who’s here!, the soiree of 2016, welcome home to the circus, getting shod, the quotidian (9.29.14), pointless and chatty, chocolate birthday cake with vanilla water frosting, a jiggle on the wild side.

One of my friends does a weekly blog post documenting her previous week’s grocery purchases and meals. It’s pretty straightforward — a bunch of photos with a bit of writing — and some might call it boring, but not me. To me, it’s the blog equivalent of eating a big bowl of homemade mac and cheese, comfy, simple, and utterly satisfying. Like pawing through someone’s pantry, a look-see at the dinner plate gives me a peek at the inner workings of another’s home: their resources, limitations, and preferences, their creativity (or lack thereof), their foibles and shortcomings, passions and desires.

So then I thought, if I like it so much, why don’t I do a what-we-ate food post? I often post food shots, but they’re random — sticks of butter or illuminated honey or stomped on loaves of underbaked bread. A running tally of what we eat, day in and day out, would be different. Maybe boring, and perhaps a wee bit embarrassing — Yet another bowl of cereal, Jennifer? Or, Where are the green vegetables, you bad mother you! — but it might be fun, too.

 So I decided to give it a go. Just for one week, just for kicks.

Turns out, there were problems.

First, I kept forgetting to take pictures.

Second, with so many of our meals being leftover-based, and with each person eating something different, honest documentation would mean a million photos, ugh.

Third, most of our family meals happen after dark, and photography after dark is a no-go.

Fourth, a lot of my meals are a series of sneaked snacks — a peanut butter apple or a handful of dry cereal or 15 Twizzlers or a margarita and too many tortilla chips — so the last thing I’d want to do is actually document the food I’m not supposed to be eating, right? 

Still, I tried. Over the course of two (three?) weeks, I got enough photos to make a post. It’s hardly a fair representation of our eating habits, but it’s something (and maybe one of these weeks I’ll try again).

Soft cheese tacos with Anaheim peppers (I found them!), rice, a couple cans of black beans into which I’d stirred a scoop of Chiro’s magic pincho seasoning (we had leftover sauce squirreled away in the fridge from their latest visit).

The next day, leftover soft cheese tacos, leftover rice that I fried up with oil and a scoop of pincho sauce, the beans, buttered and roasted beets from the garden carefully and evenly divided out among the six of us so we all get some like it or not, and salsa.

And the next day, the last of the soft cheese tacos, more pincho fried rice (the kids love it), and scrambled eggs.

The kids adore sandwiches, especially when there’s lebanon balogna. Everyone differs on their cheese preferences. Some go for “yellow” cheese (Colby, mild cheddar), but I’m partial to Jarlsburg, a.k.a “hole-y cheese.” The dill pickles are from Costco, the only dills my kids like, though I detect a displeasing chemical taste.

A cool day (finally!) equals soup: white beans, a bag of frozen chard from my mother’s garden, a jar of tomatoes that didn’t seal, sausage from my cousin Zoe, frozen turkey broth, with buttered sourdough toast on the side. I froze the leftovers and then regretted it. I wanted more.

My older daughter insists she can’t cook, which is utterly ridiculous — she just doesn’t want to — so I said she had to cook dinner but it had to be real food, not eggs. And then in the end, I chose the menu for her — Indian chicken, rice, green beans — and left the house. I got a lot of panicked phone calls, but she did it. Shortly before supper, I slipped a whole head of cauliflower into the over to roast (an experiment): it flopped.

I had a bunch of fresh mozzarella that I was afraid would soon go bad, so I made pizza rolls: hunks of five-minute dough rolled into sloppy rectangles, sprinkled with garlic powder and Italian seasoning, and layered with pepperoni and lots of fresh mozz, rolled up and, after baking, brushed with melted butter and sprinkled with more garlic powder, Italian seasoning, and Parmesan. OUT OF THIS WORLD. (Dipping sauce from a half pint of roasted tomato sauce that hadn’t sealed properly and that I spiced up with spices, and, on the side, roasted broccoli with lemon.)

This same time, years previous: evening feeding, the quotidian (9.26.16), better than cake, test your movies!, the run around, 37, she outdid herself, painting my belly, vacationing until it hurts.

This same time, years previous: a bunch of things, grape pie, a day in the life, stop and sink, the quotidian (9.22.14), hurdle-free molten brownie cakes, we love Fred.