Simplifying Our Food Repertoires, a Good Recipe to Heed at an Older Age

This is not about holiday cooking, which we write about all the time. This is about the everyday prep that we do to feed ourselves and a partner or spouse if we’re attached.

After decades—more than five for each of us—of being out of our parents’ homes and married, then single, we’ve gone through different styles and stages/phases of cooking to reflect our varied status and changed taste buds.

Phase I: Please pass the cans
In the beginning we focused on foods of the time and modest budgets—tuna noodle casserole, Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks (good and crispy we recall), Chef Boyardee’s canned beef ravioli (pretty tasty with lots of sauce), homemade spaghetti with bottled sauce (good unless you’re a food snob) and all served with an iceberg green salad and bottled dressing and a vegetable, including the little petit pois in a can. Maybe, it was the decade of canned foods after our mothers dealt with frozen foods, thanks to Mr. Birds Eye and his invention (Birdseye: The Invention of a Curious Man by Mark Kurlansky, a great read). We thought we were terrific budding chefs, especially when we added a first course or dessert. Grapefruit, anyone?

Phase II: Simple recipes, please
When the first Silver Palate cookbook came out, Barbara was among its early fans. A friend had told her she had to buy it, and she was lucky enough to live in New York City, close to its then West Side take-out food shop. Margaret followed when someone sent her a copy. We each dived into slightly more exotic fare within its pages, but those were still easy recipes that caught our eye such as a great zucchini bread, brownies, a wild rice salad and chicken Marbella, which lasted for days and was company worthy.

Phase III: Time to get creative and experiment with a flood of cookbooks
With the emergence of Juilia Child and her Mastering the Art of French Cooking cookbook, we went on a French kick with lots of butter and stews—not hard but took time, onion soup—also not difficult but labor intensive, ratatouille and lots of tarts, especially her apple with homemade applesauce. We tried Chinese foods in a wok (thanks Joyce Chen, restaurateur and cookbook author), which meant more labor-intensive chopping and some slightly exotic spices such as rice wine vinegar and sesame oil and even some Indian cuisine and papadum breads and curries. We got good at making lots of Martha Stewart recipes from her first Entertaining book (but never made a wedding cake from that book), some of which required stuffing peapods and cherry tomatoes with this and that cheese (including pimento cheese which has made a comeback) and having good hand-eye dexterity.

When dessert queen Maida Heatter emerged, Barbara was elated, especially with her Queen Mother’s Cake in her first cookbook, which became a staple for a long time for Passover since it didn’t use flour but instead ground almonds.

We also started subscribing to food and wine magazines from Gourmet to Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Saveur, Cook’s Illustrated, and others and had fun comparing notes with friends who liked to cook as we did.

Phase IV: Get grilling and watch others cook
When Bobby Flay emerged in 1999, it was out to the grille. We also started downloading food blog recipes when that genre emerged, and of course became fans of Ina Garten when her first book debuted, the Barefoot Contessa also in 1999. Cooking shows tempted us more, though with children we tended to watch more than copy much of what was being made, except when we cooked for dinner parties, something our grown children rarely do.

Phase V: Suddenly, a single serving
But once we each became single and hit our 60s, a lot of our interest dissipated; even more so now that we’re well in our 70s. We got tired of buying exotic ingredients including fresh herbs and spices (garam masala, which a recipe Barbara wanted to make election night called for; she bagged that ingredient and added extra curry).

We also began the adventure of sometimes taking out food such as chicken pot pies from one favorite food store counter Margaret likes or buying better frozen meals at places such as Trader Joe’s, which offers a wicked mushroom risotto. Our portion size has also gotten smaller as our digestive systems have aged. We’re back to the tomato soup and grilled cheese of our elementary school days but not from Campbell’s (Garten offers a good easy recipe), fresh roasted turkey breast slices from the deli counter sounds delish if there’s no listeria scare and frozen ravioli now in a package and up to $12 at one farmers’ market Barbara frequents and with interesting stuffing ingredients of asparagus, cheese, lobster, mushroom and others is a good staple to have on hand.

Current Phase VI: Window shopping
We’ve entered a new phase, akin to window shopping, We look, read, talk about food, think about it and even dream about it, participate in a cookbook club and still find it fun to read the New York Times’ weekly food section and Sunday recipe in its magazine. We subscribe to only a few food magazines as they’ve gotten more elaborate and frankly the combinations are often bizarre or too expensive to concoct, again with too many ingredients we don’t stock. We take out new food books from our libraries such as Milk Street’s weighty Bake, which includes 200 recipes.

We scan some blogs such as Smitten Kitchen’s from Deb Perlman just to see if something piques our interest. But we’ve realized we’re reading them more for entertainment and to keep up with what others might prepare or we might find on a menu in a restaurant. It’s sort of like peeking at the stars in People magazine at the grocery line. We want to have some idea of what’s in and what’s out or who are the hot new actors. But we now rarely watch a cooking show, even the Great British Bake Off that so many enjoy (Margaret loves it) and find hilarious. Barbara still reads books about food such as the biography of food editor Judith Evans, who was Julia’s editor, or Jacque Pepin’s wonderful biography Apprentice. And when she recently decluttered and found recipes she had saved through the decades, she kept most for posterity (a broccoli-cheddar casserole) and to share with daughters how we used to cook long ago.

It's no surprise that over the last 50 years our tastes have become simple, and our main techniques are broiling and roasting, even though Margaret still makes a mean tray of tall puffy popovers, which she freezes and then literally pops out and heats. We start the day with a bowl of shredded wheat as one 100-year-old friend does or oatmeal and think more about our health, so little frying is on the menu. But high on the repertoire list are all the colorful vegetables, herbs and fruits (lots of berries) we like the idea of using from our knowledge about 20 healthy foods to eat every day to help us stay well and ward off Parkinson’s disease, dementia and other illnesses.

Don’t think of us as stick-in-the-mud old fogies. The fact is today food has become fuel to keep us going rather than the highlight of each and every day. That, in of itself, makes this a very healthy phase.

And to all a Happy Holiday! 

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