Dinner Uncomplicated with Claire Tansey

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hartunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This episode one hundred and seventy, which is first airing in early November, we are going to be interviewing Clara Tansey, who is the author of Dinner Uncomplicated, which is a wonderful new cookbook that Sarah and I can recommend for people who are trying to get dinner on the table and busy life, busy families. So, Sarah, I know you track your meals, so we thought we'd talk about what we've been eating lately. And Sarah in fact can tell you in detail if you would ask me to how I spent you know, October sixteenth, you know whatever, two thousands. Actually, like multiple ways I could look this up because I also tend to. So we do put all of our meals with the kids' activities on like a whiteboard and then I snap a picture of it and send it to my husband and our nana each week, so like we know times and cooking and that kind of stuff. So I have that, plus I write it my planner, So yes, I have like many ways of looking at it. One of my favorite episodes of I think it's the Girl's next Door podcast where they do this is they'll like go through a week of dinners like randomly, like this is what we ate. Maybe it was mom our as well. I think one of them have done it after the other one did it, So I thought we should open the episode and do a similar thing and just talk about what we ate in the last week. So yes, do it. Yeah, So, as we're recording this, it's mid October, and if we go back to last Thursday, we had a turkey chili with cheese. You know what I don't. I honestly don't know which recipe was used, because I wanted it to be this pumpkin turkey chili from Real Simple. But there's been like a run on pumpkin and I can't find it at all. I don't know if it's a national shortage or just like it's not making it down to Florida, but like I cannot buy pumpkins. So we just had a different one and I served it with tortilla chips and avocados, and the big kids really like this. Genevieve was a little picky with anything that's kind of tomato based, so I think she ate like a snackplate of the cheese and the avocado and the chips, and maybe I took some of the beans out of the chili and the meat and like put them on the plate. So that was Thursday. Friday was really boring because we ate the same thing because we have a lot of leftovers in our house. And I added goldfish instead of the chips for the kids, which was a very popular hit. So that works actually pretty well, like the little cheesy gold flich flavor flavor went with it. On Saturday, Josh was on call and actually he did not make it home for takeout night, which is really sad because usually when he's on call, he at least can make it for dinner. But in this particular one he was not able to because his work has been insane lately, and we ordered pizza and we had it delivered with salad, and then because he wasn't there in part, we had like so much extra pizza. And now my freezer is full of pizza. So that's cool on Sunday. You're gonna hear about this later in the episode. But I made the butter tofu from our guest's cookbook and served it with rice and broccoli. However, I was not living a fantasy life where I thought the kids were gonna eat butter tofu, even though they're not that selective. This was just like a little bit beyond what I would expect. So I did make a box of frozen chicken nuggets for them, which I rarely made make, and therefore they were like enamored with these chicken nuggets. On Monday, we had which Arnani cooked sweet potato chicken curry with none, which was I loved it. The kids did not like it. Unfortunately, my youngest one did eat it because we told her the sweet potato was pumpkin, and apparently she thought that was cool, like for Halloween anyway. And then yesterday I think they had or Tuesday a fried egg on rice with snappeas because again they wouldn't eat that curry, and that's kind of what we'd planned. I had left and then yesterday, Laura, You're gonna like die when you hear this is one of my kid's favorite things, which is really random, but they really like this chickpea and kale soup with parmechan. You can't see Laura, but she's making an ugly face. I don't know why, like they won't eat certain things, but that they actually, all three of them will eat, and like, so we had that and I served it with simpita and they eat that sounds lovely. I'd eat it, you know, I know you would eat it. I would eat it. So I don't actually track my meals, but I can remember from the last week, and so I'll just sort of talk through the week that we're in. Monday night, Michael and I went out for our first date night in seven months, so that was fairly exciting. We have childcare until seven on Mondays, so it worked to go for a quick dinner at six and we went and got Mexican food Margarita's. On Monday night, Margarita's just makes Monday night every seals so much better. So that was great. I have no idea what the kids ate. They were probably that same of chicken nuggets, which we don't view as a rare thing, so but they still like them. Tuesday, we had one of our sun Basket meal kits. We get two sun Basket Meal kits per week. This was chili made with It was like a chorizo type chili with pumpkin seeds and coconut cream, and I liked it. It was also incredibly spicy, and we only put like half the chili in that it was calling for and it was still just like I mean, our noses were running like crazy. The kids obviously didn't eat that either. I don't even good though, I feel what they ate. Wednesday, so that's Michael cooked the second sun Basket kit, which was turkey kebabs with squash and carrot ribbons with a Mediterranean dressing. It was good. I enjoyed it. The kids had something else Thursday. I think we're going to have we have some roast. We have all this acorn squash from I also get this hungry harvet box. Every other week we get a box it's like twenty five bucks if people want to sign up for this, but it's like a slightly damaged or irregular produce, and the idea is that you are creating a market for these goods that can't be sold in the supermarket but are still good. I mean, it tastes perfectly fine if your acorn squash has a slight blemish on it or is shaped funny. So we're gonna have roasted squash and probably just some sort of protein. And we had a lot of chicken breasts in the house or possibly sausages or something, I'm not really sure. Friday, we tend to do pizza, make your own pizza with dough and cheese and sauce and stuff, or we do Dojiorna's. We always have those in the Fraser. Saturday, lately we've been doing football fair chicken wings, nachos, you know, watching Texas A and M football games. It's sort of a fall tradition on Saturdays, but we time shifted, so it's like we've taped it from earlier the day because we can never actually go, you know, watch it at the time when it's so we do it at night. Sunday is when we just have to figure out if Michael has bought stuff in his weekly grocery chip. That's good. We do that. Last week we did brats for the adults and hot dogs for the kids, plus corn and tomato salads, so that's pretty standard kind of Sunday thing. The kids always have something that's either chicken nuggets, pasta pizza, hot dogs like you know, last night they had some outlier kid that's more of a well, Sam is slightly more of an outlier, though he still doesn't really like our stuff. I mean, he'll eat the tomato salads, he'll eat whatever veggies we tend to put on his plate. He likes stronger stuff like Bosomic vinegar and pickles and mustard, but he's still not really I mean, he's given more to the kids stuff than ours. He doesn't really want to try our stuff, So there we go. I'm kind of past the point of caring about that, but anyway, that's what we're eating these days. I love it. Your football night in particular sounds really fun and cozy and yeah, no I like it. My kids probably like the football fair right, well, they don't eat the chicken wings. They won't eat the chicken wings, but they'll eat the nachos obviously, So we tell you wings and nuggets and nachos exactly, exactly. All right, Well, let's hear what Claire has to say about all this. Well, Sarah and I are very excited to welcome Claire Tansey to the program. She is the author of the cookbook Dinner Uncomplicated, and she has some great advice for us on how to make dinner less well complicated. So Clara, can you introduce yourself to our listeners. Well, Hi, yeah, So I'm Claire. I am a mom of one eight year old. I'm married. I live in Toronto, Canada, and I've been a magazine editor in the food world, and a chef and a restaurant critic and kind of any job you can think of that has to do with food. And in twenty sixteen, I kind of quit my big corporate job and decided to start doing things for myself. Started essentially my own business called Claire Tansy's Kitchen, and I launched my first book, which is called Uncomplicated in twenty eighteen. And this is my new book, Dinner Uncomplicated, So I guess the second in the series, and it just came out last month, and I have to say that both Laura and I ordered copies of this book, and it's really funny. Claire actually graciously offered to send it. We're like too late. We already ordered it because it looks so good that we both wanted it like asap, and it has lived up to its title. And so we'll talk a little bit more about some specific recipes in that book and how awesome it is. But that is great. So you've been kind of living the freelance own company lifestyle now and your son is how old? He's eight? So he just started grade three the chaos that is this year. He just started grade three. Yeah, and he's our only kid and he's a good boy most of the time. Awesome. Well, we will want to hear a little bit about since you don't have experience in feeding kids, and kids who may or may not be more soive about what they eat will definitely want to you to share some wisdom around that. But first, you promised to make dinner easier for our listeners, and I know that you know on this podcast we have a lot of very busy women making it work. Some of them have help with cooking, some of them absolutely do not. Some of them have their kids doing some of the cooking. So tell us from your perspective, how do we make dinner easier? Yes, this is the work of my life, is making dinner easier. I really do. I believe so strongly that dinner doesn't have to be complicated to be delicious. It can also be actually the best part of our day, and it can lead to so many incredible benefits and really, without being too fancy, it could be grill cheese sandwiches. And you know, there are scientific studies that prove that having dinner together with your family, no matter how simple it is, if it's most nights of the week, you are getting benefits in terms of your physical health, your mental health, your financial health, the planets health, but best of all, in those family relationships. So I wanted to figure out a way to make that dinner ritual easier and more fun. And the way you do that is to reduce the stress around it. So this book in particular, is divided up by time, how much time each recipe takes to cook, because that was always pre COVID, that was always the number one obstacle that people came to me with right, like, oh, I don't have time to cook. I don't have time to cook. So I thought, well, okay, let's divide up to chapters so that the first chapter is fifteen minute recipes. And I don't mean like fifteen minute recipes like you may have seen on TV, like this is with nothing prepared, with the oven not preheated, like you walk into your kitchen. I set a timer for myself when I'm developing these recipes, and you're eating in fifteen minutes, So you know, a bunch of those recipes because we all need those. No matter who you are, you need those quick recipes. And then the rest of the chapters kind of fall into line. There's a make ahead chapter. There's a big chapter on how to stalk the freezer in the really the smartest way, I call it Sunday stash. There's a set it and forget it chapter. So maybe you can take ten minutes in the morning chuck something in the slow cooker, or maybe take ten minutes just before you go pick up the kids and then throw something in the oven for an hour. So it's those sort of like finding those pockets of time. And I really wanted to set it up this way, because I know that that's how my life is. There are some nights when I can take forty five minutes and listen to the radio and enjoy my night, But then there are other nights when we need to eat, like actually five minutes ago. We have had many of those nights. Yes, I love that they're separated. And I have not made that many recipes yet. I've made two so far. But I was flipping through that really quick section because that does tend to be our scenario sometimes, and they do indeed look pretty quick, so I'm excited about that. Yeah, I'm always a little put off with the recipes that are like it's it's twenty minutes. It's like, no, it's not, yeah, twenty minutes yet, that's right. It was really fun developing that chapter because so I've been a recipe developer and a recipe tester for almost twenty years, so I really had to lean on every shortcut I could think of, every trick, every kind of like corner I could cut with still having incredible results, right, So it was really fun, Like I truly I would walk into the kitchen, I would start a stop watch, and if I wasn't eating at fifteen minutes. I had to either revamp the recipe or cut it from the chapter. I love that. So, Clara, you recommend knowing, you know, three very simple recipes and always having the ingredients on hand as a way to sort of put off the dinner emergency issue. So what are your three simple recipes that you always have the stuff on hand? And if you have, you know, any others you suggest for listeners too, I'd love to hear those. Yeah, these are my back pocket dinners and they have saved me more time, Like they save you from takeout right or they save you from from not from having cereal for dinner. I guess, So which is that does happen sometimes? So my three backprocket dinners are there's a pasta with butter and parmesan. I know, it sounds like the simplest recipe. It has been consisted. It was on my website it was that's actually what my kids order all the time in restaurant, but my mind too, and it's consistently the number one visited recipe on my website year after year, month after month after month. So I'm like, all right, well putting it in here, because you know what pasta's packed with protein. Butter and parmesan are good ingredients. Let's get them on there. We eat that a lot. Sometimes my husband and I will put ooh, peas and maybe chili flakes in it. We have passed with butter and parm I also always keep a can of black beans in the cupboard, and I always have tortillas or wraps or some kind of bread product and cheese in the fridge, and so I can make black bean casadias in the blink of an eye. And our third one is usually it's of an egg based so because we always have eggs. And so there's something in the new book called a Dutch baby. It's a cheesy Dutch baby, and it's imagined like a pancake and a crape and an omelet kind of get together. You cook it in a big cast iron pan. It's for ingredients. It puffs up in this beautiful, magical, scientific experiment kind of a thing, looks like either you're familiar with popovers or Yorksh're pudding and packed with cheese and eggs, and it's just so yummy and it's ready so fast. And I serve that with a salad, and we all love that. So those are my three back pocket dinners. I always say something based on pasta is really smart because that's something you can just keep in the pantry. Something based on eggs is usually pretty smart because again we almost always have eggs in the kitchen. And then something based on like a can or something, whether it's a can of tune or a can of black beans or a can of chick peas, those are really smart backpocket dinners. My kids in particular, love black bean anything, so yeah, it's great. And then you can you can you can stockpile them exactly. Yeah, twelve, sure, I think my children have not allowed a black bean to pass their lips. But we will get to that. Yeah, let's actually take a quick break and then we will be right back and we can talk a little bit about selective eating. All right, we are back, and while we left off, we were talking a little bit about how some kids tend to be. You know, the word pickiness has actually gone out of style because it has a little bit of a negative connotation. I prefer the word selective, even though my kids are actually not that selective. But still, for my patients and in general, Claire, I want you to talk a little bit about your super taster tendency and how that might play into selective eating, and then some of the strategies that you have used for your son to get him to venture out a little bit. So I'm with you, Picky eating to me is just normal normal kids. You know, if you look at evolution, it actually makes a lot of evolutionary sense for kids to become very selective and very choosy about what they eat at around the same age that if you think about our ancestors thousands and thousands of years ago, at the same age that they be walking away from the group for the first time, so they have to naturally become fussy and selective so that they don't eat poison berries and they don't kill off the line. Right. So if you think about it in that way, piggy eating, selective eating is absolutely normal behavior for kids. Now. The other thing is kids, again back to that evolutionary thing, all their tongues want at that age in their life is a sweetness. So they just want like, they just want carbohydrates, right, because that's what your body needs for energy, and so that means, yeah, they just want so I sauce or bread and butter or plain pasta with butter and parmesan. That is totally normal, totally normal behavior. Bitter flavors and more complex flavors and stronger flavors like you know, sardines and blue cheese, those come along as our brains get evolved, and we can train ourselves to learn to love those things. Now that said, as you mentioned, Sarah, I am a super taster. So that's a genetic condition where I have more taste buds on my tongue than the average person. They call it super taster, but there's not really too much super about it, because it means that you taste things really, really intensely, and I've noticed it my whole life. But then when I was pregnant, Holy Molly, it was like supercharged and I couldn't smell eggs cooking without feeling nauseous. And then the other two flavors that really started to bother me when I was pregnant was blue cheese and lamb, so two flavors that I normally love but which we would all agree are kind of stronger flavors. And it was almost a physical reaction, like I couldn't even be in the room if they were being cooked, and so that stayed with me after I had the baby. And now eight years later and I'm still like, I still have that super taste issue, which means there are some bitter foods I really can't eat. There are some really pungent foods that I can't eat. I just they're just too strong for me. It's like I get a sensory overload, so really strong blue cheese, something like a pickled egg. You know, it's just too much for me. Or my husband really loves things like kidneys and liver, and that is an absolute zero for me. Now, I told you it's genetic. And so guess who got it? My kid, My eight year old kid. And from the time he was four, maybe even younger than four, he can taste the difference completely unprompted, between an organic chicken and a supermarket chicken. And so you think, oh, fantastic, isn't that great? Wow? What a great No, that is a per problem for a parent, like a bad problem. He loves sausages. I got sausages from our local Italian grocer. They put fennel seeds in them. He tells me. It tastes like black licorice. Why can't eat this, it tastes like black liquorice. He's right, He's right. It doesn't make it any less annoying. So so I've realized pretty early on that this was going to be well an issue, you know what. I didn't want to make it a big deal, but it's an issue. And I studied a lot about children and selective eating and children's palettes, and I did a lot of deep research onto it, into it, and came up with this sus which is a philosophy that's pretty common now amongst dieticians and educators when it comes to kids eating. Which is the philosophy is that it's the parent's responsibility to provide nutritious meals in a pleasant environment at regular intervals, and it is the child's responsibility to decide what, if, and in fact how much to eat. So what that looks like in practical terms at our table is that everything is always served family style, so stuff is right in the middle of the table. It's great for kids, even quite young, to learn how to serve themselves. Is really good for their fine motor skills. Actually, yeah, it's going to be a bit messy, but hey, you know, put it, throw a tarp down, like it's going to be okay. It's better that. And there's always something in that kind of family style buffet that I know my kid will eat my friends that has been crackers in butter, many a nite, bread and butter, plain rice, plain pasta, plain French, homemade French fries. So it's that is sort of the anchor of the dinner. And then there's no pressure. You don't have to eat it. It's a liberating phrase, you don't have to eat it, And instead we focus on the dinner table being a place where the three of us come together every day almost without fail, and we're there together in a kind of a low stress, low stakes environment, and that is where we're getting the benefit. So that's where we're building those family relationships. We are saving money. It's good for our mental health, it's good for our physical health, it's good for the planet. And it's that repetitious, near on boring ritual that really is the foundation of our family. And I really trust that eventually my son is going to see his dad and I enjoying ourselves tasting a lot of different foods and in an environment where there's no pressure, he's going to feel comfortable to reach out and start tasting some stuff that sounds yeah, like a good I'm sure it will. I'm sure it will get there. I have to admit, as I'm listening to you, I'm like, oh, that sounds so nice, because I mean, in our house, we don't typically gather for dinner. I gather sometimes with the kids, depending on my time frame. My husband is rarely he's a surgeon and rarely done in time for dinner except on the weekends, in which case, especially with date night being a thing of the past lately, we typically do eat dinner together as a family on Saturday and Sunday, and I do. I will say, I enjoy that ritual. So I guess I will say to listeners, if you're in my boat, and it can't be an everyday thing, or if it has to be in some kind of altered form, like maybe it's just the mom and the kids someday and the other half the kids you know, the other day. Whatever it is, it doesn't mean there can be some healing powers to it. Because I love the image what you said, you know, see at the end of the day together and no pressure. Yeah, with it, And and to your point, yet if it's more you don't want people kind of sitting in front of the TV and eating or grabbing a snack and then lying in their bed doing their homework and eating. Like if everybody's in the house at something that looks like either dinner time or lunchtime or breakfast time, get together at the table, turn off those screens, and you know, just spend some time together. Now, I'm not going to say those conversations are always meaningful, especially now that we've been trapped together for seven months. Early in the pandon, my husband was building a shed. It was all he could talk about. My son was playing hours and hours and hours of Minecraft, the video game Minecraft, all he could talk about. And I sat at the table and said to them, that's it. Not one more word about sheds or Minecraft at this table, dead silence for the rest of the dinner. We're like, you took away our topics. I mean, like, there's nothing else I'd rather have silence than to listen about. Exactly just funny, very funny and cute stage where like the big kids will talk about Minecraft, and then like our youngest, because she just wants to be involved, we'll start talking about Minecraft even though she has no idea, like, she'll just join in like oh yeah, and minecraft we're like, you don't play, I feel like you. So, speaking of family meals, you say you post your family's favorite meals somewhere and that this helps you with planning. It seems like a very simple hack. But why why is this so important to do? Yeah? I love these analog hacks. So we it's literally a piece of loose leaf paper and we all contribute to it and we write down what our favorite meals are and we have a list. Now, I don't know, our list is probably about eighteen or so meals, and it's meals that we all like or that it's somebody's favorite. And I keep that tape to the inside of my cupboard door because you know, one of the big roadblocks between an average person and making dinner can be I don't have an idea of what to make, and if you have this very simple, very easy to access list of meals that you know you and your family like, it can just overcome that roadblock in a heartbeat. So if you're like, oh gosh, it's two o'clock, what's for dinner? And you look at that list and quickly go, oh, spaghetti meatballs. Yep, you know what, I've got some ground meat, And so it can kind of just be that little stepping stone over one of those big roadblocks. There are five big roadblocks to dinner, and not having enough time and not having an idea are the two most like worst ones that are going to provide you from making dinner. What are the other three, now you set yourself up, Yeah, of course, Number three is not having the groceries, like you don't have the stuff in the house for what you want to make. Number four is not having the right equipment or feeling like you don't have the skills. And that can be you know that something requires you dispatchcock a chicken, or it requires a spiralizer and you don't have one. And the fifth one, the fifth one is actually the toughest one to overcome because it's what we just talked about. It. It's what I call being out of sink when not everybody will eat the same thing at the same table. And so that can be a selective eater as a kid. It can be a teenager who's decided to become vegan. It can be a spouse who's given up carbs because they're training for a marathon. It can be a number of different things. But when you don't have when you don't have everybody willing to eat the same meal, it can be pretty hard to be motivated to cook anything. Yeah, the multiple meals thing is always annoying, but you know, we've just you know, I like to think of it in terms of the there's always something on the table that they like. I mean the fact that I actually making pasta separately from a dinner. It's not that it's a separate dinner, it's just that there's something on the table that they like. I love all food, and it's sorts of great annoyance to me. My children do not love all food. But you know, one of the hacks that I know many of our listeners rely on, and you've mentioned as well as the whole rotisserie chicken, which is not something we ever bought growing up. But I have come to see the genius in I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your favorite rotisserie chicken. Oh love love rotissary chicken. And I was determined with this book to come up with at least a couple of recipes that could take that rotisserie chicken and within fifteen minutes turn it into something that wasn't just picking apart the chicken with your fingers and maybe spread and mayonnaise on a piece of toast with it. So one of the ways I like to elevate it is to make couscouscouse takes five minutes. You know, you just boil some water and into the couscous. If you just add like a handful of either raisins or currants and a few spices, you can actually turn that into what I call a couscous pee leaf. Spread that out on a tato on a platter, and then carve up the chicken and serve it over top. It is magnificent, and it makes that ro tissery chicken feel like it's going on the prom like it is so delicious and really truly five minutes to make the couscous and then maybe five minutes to carve up the chicken you're eating, so really really simple. The other one, which actually is my current favorite recipe right now, although I love them all, love them all, but this one's my current favorite. It's it's a sesame ramen salad with chicken. So I told you in that fifteen minute chapter. I was looking for every shortcut and every trick I could in the book, and I realized that ramen noodles, the staple of my university college days, were like, they cook in three minutes. So if you take if you but get yourself some raw neuds, throw out this seasoning packet. You don't need that. Just boil them up, and then I make a pretty simple but yummy sauce with some natural peanut butter and soy sauce and a bit of vinegar and a bit of ginger. Mix that up, toss that with these noodles, and then add some sliced rotisserie chicken and a little bit of sliced celery. I've always got celery in the fridge. It seems to last forever, but it's fantastic. It's got such great crunch and brightness. That is a spectacular dinner. So you've got these gorgeous ramen noodles. They're super fun to look at, Like kids love ramen noodles right there else squidly, and this incredible sauce that truly tastes like it came from a gourmet shop. The tender chicken, the crunch from the celery. It's ready in ten minutes. It is so so yummy, you'll never feel like you're just eating grocery stork shortcuts. Again, I'm totally gonna make that. I didn't mention it yet, but one of the recipes that we did try and my kids all raved about it, like three for three gobbling it was the I think that's called scallion salmon noodles, and it is also made with ramen noodles, and you whip together a sauce and you roast some salmon. You basically throw it all together and like they wild. So I feel like this would probably be even easier because users rochippery chicken, and probably as much of a hit because I do know they've liked peanut sauce in other forms before that salmon. That's salmon with the scallion sauce. I don't get it, but it's a huge hit with kids. People are emailing me just yesterday saying, my kids are eating salmon and ramon. It's fantastic. I love the noodles and they're nice and silky, and that sauce has a little bit of sweetness to it, but it's also savory, and I guess that helps them to overlook the scallions, which is like my favorite part. So there you go. So, Claire, if you are going to do some prep on weekend, we have sort of mixed feelings on this podcast about spending weekend time meal prepping. But if you are in the mindset that you wish to do that, what what are the most efficient, you know, bang for your buck, things to actually do on the weekend to get ahead for the week. I love that you have mixed feelings. I have mixed feelings about it too, So I thought, what's the that's the best use of my time? If I can find an hour on the weekend. I don't really want to make, say like a batch of chili and put in the freezer, because personally I get tired of that. Either I get tired of it or it just goes into the freezer and then it never comes out again. So I thought, Okay, how about instead I prep some building blocks for dinners. So that's what the Sunday Stash chapter is about. And it's four basic recipes that you can make in bulk. There's a bologna sauce, There's a really simple parsley pesto so yummy. There's a whole grain, so any whole grain could be brown, rice, could be farro, could be barley. You cook in big batches, and then there's a brothy bean. So you take dried beans, cook them and make this lovely broth, very very simple. Then you freeze those recipes in three separate portions, and then what you get in the book is three different ways to use those building blocks. So instead of just making one meal and then having to eat that three times, you're actually creating twelve different meals for yourself. So with the pesto, for example, you made this really simple parsley pesto. I mean it takes ten minutes and honestly, it takes the same amount of time to make a triple batch as it does to make a single batch. Divide it into three zip blocks, put in the freezer, and then one night you can make roasted chicken breast with a little bit of mozzarella and some pesto and tomato on it. Another night you could do pasta with a bit of spinach or greens and some pesto in there. And then on the third night you can make something else with pesto like you could do. I can't even remember what's in the book now, but you'd have a third recipe. I'm actually now going to have to look it up. It is ooh gosh, oh yes, it is cheesy pesto. It is cheesy pesto and ham calzones. So a little bit of store bought pizza do sorry for the delay there, you know, and your brain won't allow you to do that, and so you make Kelsones. So you've got three completely different meals there that you've really made with one of your building blocks, and it's the same with the other building blocks that you're stuck in the freezer. So it's really like prepping yourself for special different meals and not just getting something made and then having to thought and eat it again and again and again. Now, if that's your jam, fantastic, I gotta recommend the ginger chicken meatballs because they freeze like a dream and kids love them too, and there's really simple glaze that goes with them. But if not, then yeah, get some brothy beans on the go. And then you've got all kinds of different options that you can make, and you could actually use it as part of your Sunday. If you did it on Sunday, for example, make a nice, possible and yeasy, and then say that a bit for later in the week from the freezer exactly, or even two or three weeks from now, right, Like I mean, ideally, if you are really doing it, if you are really doing it in a smart way, ultimately, by like the end of the month, you'd have seventeen different things in your freezer. You just choose. We just like being at the store. This is like the ultimate goal there. Well, very cool, Sarah, Did you have any other questions for Claire? What are you making for dinner tonight? So it was Canadian Thanksgiving this past weekend, so she's got leftovers. She's got leftovers. So even though it was just three of us, we had a whole turkey and a whole ham. So last night we had turkey pop pie. And so tonight we are doing My husband is British, so he wants something called ham, eggs and chips, and so he's in charge. My friends and I will just smile and nod and be very grateful that somebody else did the cooking. Sounds lovely, well, Claire. We end with our love of the week, which is something that is really cool for us. This week, I can start and Sarah can go next. To give you just a little chance to think about it, I have been enjoying making myself oatmeal for breakfast. I do quit cooking Quaker type stuff. I mix in a little bit of granola and cut up apples and peanut butter, and so it's just like got everything in it, and you know, it's just a powers me up for the rest of the day. How about you, Sarah? Well, okay, I feel like I have to give a shout out to the other recipe that I have made it from Claire's cookbook, which is the Butter Tofu and was totally delicious. But I will also do a mild spin on what Laura said and tell you all that my new favorite cereal is Quaker Oatmeal squares and I'm slightly obsessed with it, particularly the cinnamon flavor, which feels very false. So there you go. I'm an adult meeting quicker adult eating this syruy cereal in the morning. That's awesome. How about you, Claire? Okay, Well, let's keep it on theme. I was found myself wandering through the grocery store the other night, I was actually shopping for work, but I was hungry, and it's true, you know, you should never grocery shop when you're hungry. And there I was in the in the cereal aisle, and I was attracted to this Kellogg's cereal that has coconut and cranberries and almonds in it, and it was on sale. So I bought a box of that, Ladies. I came right home, I made myself a bowl of it. I sat down, I watched some TV and had cereal in front of the TV by myself. We know how the special those moments can be, so I feel like could be repeated tonight, maybe the next night too. That sounds pleasure. It's the little things, all right. Well, Claire, thank you so much for joining us, and for all our listeners. Please pick up a copy of Dinner Uncomplicated, which is the newest cookbook from Clara Tansey and Sarah can vouch that there's some great recipes in there that her kids have been eating. My kids are, you know, we're working progress, but her kids will eat Clara's food, so that is a great shout out for it. There. So Clara, thanks for joining us. Such a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Guys. All right, well, that was a wonderful episode with great dinner ideas. I think we've all decided that it's perfectly okay to serve butter and parmesan noodles because we have an official, you know, food person making that for her family. So our question this week is a little different. Comes from a listener who says she comes from a traditional family where women are expected to stay home full time with their children, and even in her extended family, you only think of a very small number of people who work and raise kids simultaneously. This listener says she is currently in medical school in hopes to one they have a few kids while still working full time. She says her family is actually supportive of her professional dreams, but then not her dreams of being a mother. They'll make comments like I'm not sure you'll have time to be a good mom. How do you recommend dealing with comments like this? Well, Sarah, since you are our resident physician here with children, I thought maybe you could you could give some insight into this. Yeah, I mean, well, I think part of it. Laura and I both agree, which is like, you know what they think they can think, but you can surely prove them wrong, and hopefully over time it won't matter as much what they initially thought anyway. But I think you know, proving it by doing it, and of course looking for support from colleagues, and especially if you can find any colleagues with a similar cultural background, and maybe you could even you know, mention that to your family. Hey, this person is also ex I don't know what this person's background is and has four kids and is thriving and her kids are going to Harvard or whatever whatever mark of success looks like in your culture or background, and perhaps with some examples that may help. But there's also just some aspect of like, you know, once you're an adult, it is your life to live, and hopefully they will still love you and you'll be able to show them what is possible. Yeah, I just think, you know, I mean, one is like they. I mean, clearly, it's like half the people going into medicine now are women, and I think they're not even aware that there are actually some real family friendly aspects of it. I mean, this lady says she wants to work full time, but in fact physicians have the ability usually to go part time without a huge career penalty, which is not necessarily the case for a great many other professions. And plus it tends to pay pretty well even for part time work, and so that's something that is you know, once you get through the training, it's entirely different. But you know, it's also like you have to live your own life. I mean it part of being an adult is recognizing that your relatives don't actually have to like your choices, and like, nobody actually will ever like all of your choices, and so what I mean it's like, ultimately people don't care that much. I mean, they care about you, but they're living their own lives too, and they're in their own little lives, and so whatever they're bringing to the table, he they're probably not thinking about it day to day. You're the one who's thinking about it, not them. They'll just say something random based on whatever they're thinking at the moment, but it's not like they're spending all their time thinking about it. Nobody will ever like all your choices, so you don't have to wear I mean, you can always just parry back on any rude comments by saying, oh, well, you know, no one could ever live up to your example, but I'll do my best when we get there. I mean, these are theoretical children and a theoretical medical career that don't actually even exist yet, so I think you know, we can cross that bridge when we get to it. Well, this has been best of both worlds. We've been interviewing Clear Tansey about dinner Uncomplicated, sharing what we are eating as well, and we will be back next week with more on making work in life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.