[...] week on my Babble blog I asked readers what they thought of Michael Ruhlman’s HuffPo rant about parents being too [...]

So by your own admission you spend less than 5 minutes interacting with your children so that they are getting a meal that fits your standards? I’d rather give my kids a 30-minute meal and play with them than have them think Mom’s too busy in the kitchen to be interested in what they would like to be doing.

Busy-ness is not an excuse. Everyone make a choice on how they use their time. I used to cook elaborate dinners when my husband and I were newlyweds. Now that I am a working mom, I have simplified my recipes so I can spend more time with my son. If that means buying a can of chicken stock instead of making it from scratch…well, we all have our priorities. My priority is us eating together, whether it is roasted chicken or macaroni and cheese.

Another thing: the more you make from scratch, the more dishes there are to clean.
So I’m not actually too busy to cook most days, even though I work full time. But I don’t want to spend every non-working moment either cooking or cleaning. I think of the mess I have to clean up once the kids are in bed now, and I use lots of pre-made ingredients (like baby carrots and chicken stock)!

I don’t know, not everyone can dictate their work hours. A shift at my workplace ends at 5, period. By the time I get one of the kids and get home, it’s about 6, and my husband picks up the other, gets home about the same time. In order to feed them before they hit meltdown and in time for bath and bed, we have food on the table by 6:30. Sometimes, that means convenience foods, sometimes not, but involved prep is not going to happen, especially since that doesn’t all leave much time for grocery shopping more than once or twice a week. We are definitely all eating together, it’s just not always as wonderful and healthy and whole-grain-veg-etc. as I would ideally like, especially since the Mr. does the shop and cook.

I love cooking healthy meals and do it when I can – but not at the expense of time spent with my kids. When they grow up, I want them to look back and remember all the quality time we spent together when they were kids, rather than mom was too busy in the kitchen to interact with us. But everyone has different priorities. Shrug.

I think it’s all about finding balance. I’m like you, in that sometimes I sacrifice family time for the sake of getting the family meal done = not ideal. On the flip side, I feel the family suffers when I don’t plan well for dinner and we just make do or eat out. Somewhere in between or balancing the two is the sweet spot… finding it is the challenge.

I fall in with the author of the original piece. You choose how to raise your children. You can choose to spend lots of time with them now at the expense of their long term health.

An occasional convenience meal won’t kill anybody, but if processed foods make up the bulk of your diet because you don’t have time or skill, you must accept that you may be directly contributing to one of many lifestyle diseases that are otherwise totally preventable: heart disease, diabetes, diabetes… If you don’t have time, make time. If you don’t have skills, get them! Find out how to make nutritious food and spend the time needed, with your family, to create the meal and savour them.

This is an interesting debate. I tend to agree with the cited article, more than not. I think that people don’t prioritize cooking. I couldn’t believe it when I babysat for wealthy families (stay-home moms) whose kids didn’t know what cooking was if it didn’t involve a microwave. Granted, the microwave meals were all Whole Foods and organic, but still. The parents rarely ate with the kids either. I know how time-consuming cooking can be, and I’m a SAHM who has the time. However, it doesn’t have to be as hard as some people think. What’s wrong with serving things like grilled sandwiches, or quesadillas, or breakfast-for-dinner in the evening? With a salad (so many different ingredients, they never have to be the same), or a simple side like steamed veggies or homemade pita chips and hummus? I think that with some creativity and planning, dinner can be on the table surprisingly fast. A lot of people just aren’t willing to take the time.

That said, if I were a working mom who didn’t get home, I’d probably be tempted to feed my kids crap fairly often just for convenience’s sake and in order to spend time with them. Because I don’t have that pressure, I am able to spend more time thinking about and planning for what will go into their bodies. And my kids happen to be good eaters!

I’m one of Jenny’s co-bloggers on The Family Kitchen and I am fascinated by this discussion…so much so that I hardly know where to begin! I agree with Ruhlman’s point (in the original article) that the 30-minute industry has not led to anyone being happier or healthier as a society. First off I think reducing a meal and a recipe to how much time it takes is ludicrous–every one chops and cooks at a different rate, and since when did home cooking become a timed-event? It can and should be enjoyable, at least most of the time, and there’s no reason why you can’t have your kids nearby chatting, doing homework, crashing Matchbox cars while you’re making the Tuesday-night quesadillas. Just because you’re not hunched over their homework doesn’t mean you’re not “with “them ( but I’m also the first to admit that I’ve used my buddy Spongebob Squarepants on several occasions when I just needed 30 minutes of a chaos-free kitchen). Since the olden days moms and grandmoms have been in the kitchen cooking roasts, and pies and Sunday gravy while the children occupied themselves. But I think my issue with Ruhlman is really his tone, it’s just more of that “tsk tsking” that I honestly think doesn’t help a single working/busy/overwhelmed parent feel any better about themselves or their ability to put together a weekday meal. Enough of the guilt! Some of us like to spend time in the kitchen—for me it’s how I de-stress, believe it or not—some of us don’t. Some of us have crazy work schedules where we don’t get home until after 7, some of us have nannies who can cook, some of us have kids who are really picky and only want to eat spaghetti with butter and cheese every night, some of us have kids who request seconds of the tuna ceviche…we all have a different set of demands that change on a daily basis and I think what we should be striving for is a community that helps us create tasty and healthful meals whenever we can so we don’t have to buy the frozen and processed junk. Maybe you do takeout once a week, maybe you reheat leftovers a couple days a week, maybe you serve popcorn one night for dinner (guilty!). But whether it takes 20 minutes or 2 hours shouldn’t be the point, it’s whether you just felt good about what you were able to put together without killing yourself in the process.
And oh yeah, my mom does the dishes so I totally understand Amy’s comment–if I had to clean 5 people’s dishes every night I’d probably lose it.

Echoing CCampion, I love to cook and do find that it is a fun way to interact with my 2-year-old when I come home from work. He loves to “help” (ahem), and it’s something different that only the two of us do together. But the tone of the original article was generally off-putting. It’s ludicrous to admonish busy parents for not doing a ROAST on a weeknight. A roast takes a long(ish) time; do it on a day when things are relaxed (there’s a reason the tradition is called “Sunday roast”). There are lots of quick, fresh, healthy meals that still require some prep (i.e., not out of a bag or a box), and those are all this working mom has time for most weeknights.

One more thing…unlike Ccampion, in my house, home cooking is a timed event. The kids get cranky when they don’t eat on time. I make notes about every recipe I try, including how much time it *really* took. If the time doesn’t justify the end result, I won’t make it again.

I am a full-time working single mom of a child with food allergies. Monday through Friday we walk in the door at 6pm-ish- my secret to getting food on the table is doing most of the prep for our meals on the weekend. My daughter can’t eat many processed foods and i had to learn to cook almost everything from scratch. What started out as a necessary chore has turned into a blessing for us, we eat a wide variety of fresh foods and i know what is in our food for the most part. Do i ‘cheat’ with canned tomatoes & stock from the store? yes when it’s not feasible to make every single thing and still keep up on other chores/errands and the FUN of life with her, but overall i make it a priority to plan & prep foods for our week ahead- we’ve both ended up healthier for it, saved money in the long run and i still have time for playtime, bathtime, storytime most nights.

Our kids are 5 and 2, and my husband picks them up and gets home around 6. When they hit the kitchen at 6:15 they’re STARVING. We don’t have an hour to spend roasting, baking, or stirring risotto, since every minute they can smell food cooking without getting to eat makes them crazy grouchy and hungry. We’ve tried rationing out cheese and crackers, or hummus and veggies, to tide them over — but they’ll fill up on that instead of waiting for dinner. They’re too little to wait. Plus, if we don’t eat until 7:30, they’re late to bed, which makes the next day even worse.

So yeah – we make quick meals in the evening. Sometimes we resort to the crock-pot, which helps. We try to cook more/better stuff on the weekend so we have good leftovers. But we don’t have the luxury of time to really cook at that hour of the day. Esp. since my job requires I work until 6 most nights, often 7 or 8, leaving Dad on his own.

Our end goal is to feed our kids and ourselves something healthy and appealing at the same time, at the same table, every evening. This is tough to do no matter how you feel about food or cooking. The 30-min meal schtick may not be the answer, but don’t knock us for trying.