When I was young, my dad would pick me up from my grandma’s house after school, and he was in charge of dinner. He had no idea what he was doing. When pressed for time due to baseball practice or a piano lesson (baseball didn’t stick, but piano did), dinner consisted of either microwaved Chef Boyardee Ravioli or Campbell’s Vegetable Beef Soup. Occasionally, they came cold, straight out of the can. Both of them were actually pretty good considering the circumstances, and after a while I actually preferred cold vegetable soup to the warmed up alternative. If you could get past the strong aluminum taste and sound of the fork scraping against the can, they were actually pretty good. Many times, dinner hinged on whether or not dad could find the can opener.

Even though dad’s repertoire was small, it did not deter his enthusiasm for frying anything he could get his hands on. When given enough time, he could certainly make a mess in the kitchen for dinner. Dad was a master at fried bologna sandwiches four or five slices deep and fried so crispy you could hear it break when you pressed the bread together. He always made the entire package of bacon, no matter how many pieces were actually needed (the correct answer is all of the pieces) every time, no exception. A favorite of mine was hamburger with cheese and then an extra piece of cheese, along with the best fried potatoes I’ve ever had. (I’ve been able to repeat the hamburger, the key is to just keep adding American cheese and some Worchester for good measure. However, I’ve never been able to get the potatoes right. The crispier they get, the more they stick to the pan. If I don’t get them crispy enough, they are just mushy and still stick to the pan. Do I not have the right type of pan? Do I need to do something special to the potatoes? Do I need a certain kind of potato? We all have questions that we hope to ask departed loved ones if we ever see them again on the other side, and near the top of my list will be “how did you get those potatoes both thin and crispy?)”

He was at a bit of a disadvantage as an older dad with absolutely no experience in the kitchen. He didn’t have much of a hands on role in raising his first two kids, and didn’t have me until he was 45. When I started grade school, mom went to work full time as a bank teller and didn’t have time to cook during the week anymore. So dad was the next man up, and I can only imagine that first night looking around the kitchen, shell shocked, in full on panic mode. I didn’t have much patience for that, and “that’s not how mom does it” was a common refrain in our house during the week. In retrospect, it’s a miracle I survived.

The kitchen was mom’s happy place. Even though it was small, she loved it. Every weekend I remember the house being full of great smells and music spilling out of our under-the-cabinet radio. She was always experimenting, trying new and crazy things, which had mostly positive results. I don’t remember any of the absolute duds, so she at least must have been able to cover her tracks well. She had all of the gadgets and gizmos, choppers, mixers, and a container for every known type of food. It wasn’t just the food–every item in the kitchen had some sort of deep connection for mom. When I was older, I donated an old meat slicer of hers and it was like I sold a sibling to the circus.

Mom was an inspired baker as well, and her Christmas poppy seed cakes were a huge hit with family and friends, garnering orders starting in September. I must have been too young to properly appreciate the poppy seed cake at the time. To me, they tasted terrible, and at some point I heard that they caused you to fail drug tests, and I knew for sure that at anytime they were going to implement a strict drug test for the local CYC eight and under boys baseball team, and I didn’t want to risk a dirty test (even though I never played due to complete lack of athletic ability). The poppy seed cake only ever grew in legend, yet I have never had another–part of me doesn’t want to try them because I’m afraid I will still think they are awful, and that will (somehow) tarnish mom’s legacy.

When it came time for me to start cooking for the family 15 years ago, I really had no idea where to start. Up until that point, Jenn did all the cooking, but right before Thanksgiving one year, she came down with the flu and pneumonia within a couple of weeks of each other and was out of commission. So my first real meal was Thanksgiving dinner Simple right? So I did what any self respecting IT guy would do, I downloaded an app and started looking up recipes online. I have no idea how that first one went, but we all survived, so it must have been OK. I had a lot of fun, and asked Jenn if she would be okay if I was the primary cook for us going forward. She was ecstatic. My wife never loved cooking, and food for her was always more about necessity than ingenuity. Over the years, my cooking style has evolved– or shall we say, coalesced, into what I loved about my parents in the kitchen .

On most Saturdays and Sundays, I get into the kitchen early and get a chance to mix it up a bit. Just like mom, the kitchen is my happy place. I pick a complicated recipe that will take all day to make, start mixing various sauces, chopping ingredients and placing them in their special measured out containers, and partaking in plenty of samples. Unlike mom, I’m not much of mad scientist in the kitchen, and have a strong desire to follow the recipe down to the last item, which often results in quick missions to the store to get capers, specific types of butter and a zest-worthy lemon. I’m also a gizmos and gadgets guy, with my Mueller Chopper as my most prized kitchen tool. I also inherited some pretty awesome kitchen stuff from mom, including a Griswold 9 cast iron skillet that was her mom’s. It’s kind of a big deal if you ask me. Usually a good three course meal takes up to three hours to make, with several stops to taste and adjust the playlist to find just the right tunes to fit each activity–also stopping periodically to check the score of the appropriate sports game (Go Sports Team!) and refresh my drink accordingly. For me, the more people the better. One of my joys is cooking all day for a house full of people and sitting down and enjoying a meal together.

Weeknights, however, are a different animal. I often find myself channeling dad. On these evenings, I have about 20 minutes to throw together something compared to the leisurely three hours that I give myself on the the weekends. There is definitely less sampling and playlist adjusting, but other things take a hit as well. I have to be creative and simple at the same time, with varying degrees of success.

Here is a list of some of the things that I have come up with over the years. This is no way an exhaustive list, but the ones I find myself going back to over and over again, as well as some that remind me of a good story, which I can’t resist.

• Family Sandwich is a large deli sandwich, at least 12 inches, preferably a King of the Hill Sandwich from Schnucks that allows each person to take as much as they want as well as add their own condiments at will. I’m not exactly sure when family sandwich became a weeknight staple, but it definitely is a go-to and probably the easiest to pull off because basically I just buy a sandwich and we eat it. Done. (After doing some informal research, I have discovered that family sandwich isn’t possible in larger families, since it it usually gone before everyone gets a crack at it.)
• Making a chef salad is a great option since you can put whatever you want in it within reason and you can continue to refresh it as the week goes on. Your only limitation is the lettuce, since that is usually the first thing to go. You can also be creative, and if you have extra time, and you can even make your own croutons, which can be quite delicious. However, be careful what the proportions are as you add ingredients to it as chef salad can easily become “cheese salad”.
• (The Crock Pot^TM is every weeknight cook’s best friend. It’s also known as a slow cooker, if you don’t actually own a Crock Pot^TM . Crock Pot^TM is kind of like the Kleenex^TM of slow cookers. For simplicity sake, and to not have to use my ^TM anymore, I’ll just refer to it as a slow cooker.) The slow cooker is every weeknight cook’s best friend. The tricky thing about a slow cooker is that even though it is simple by nature, it can get get complicated on either side of the prep, depending on what you’re making. There could be any number of extra things to do, including chopping, browning, mixing sauces, boiling noodles, or going to McDonalds when you forget to actually turn on the crockpot before going to work. Also make sure that you don’t overcook it. Apparently you can burn something in the crock pot, and it’s an especially disturbing kind of burnt.
• Another easy one that all the kids love is pigs in a blanket, with the adult version of that being normal sized hot dogs sliced down the middle with a slice of cheese inside, and wrapped in a crescent roll. Only recently did I figure out that you need to spread out your crescent rolls as to not take this meal from being a hit to gag inducing. No one likes gooey dough wrapped around a cheese-stuffed hot dog.
• Soboro Donburi is an Asian dish that includes ground beef and a green veggies with white rice. However, without this information ahead of time and if you eat all of the rice, it just looks like a bowl of hamburger with peas in it. (Also, is it just me or does everyone hate peas? I mean, it’s not completely unwarranted. Small green blobs of nothing worth mentioning, and no discernible flavor profile.) “Hamburger Peas” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. This one is pretty easy to make, but you have to make sure that you have enough rice, or you will be mercilessly mocked by those that you feed every night.
• Wild Rice Casserole is a weeknight staple at our house. Throw some long grain wild rice in the rice cooker (also a must have for any self respecting weeknight cook), and then mix it up with some precooked chicken, soup and wine, top with some parm and throw it in the oven. Super simple, but it’s tasty enough to seem complicated.

I’ve been able to find a happy medium when it comes to cooking and this is in no small part due to what I’ve learned from both of my parents. There’s an art to mastering a weeknight meal–probably more so than during the weekend. The bulk of cooking you’ll do is by sheer volume, and the mistakes seem bigger because they are harder to fix under a time constraint. Too many of these quick mistakes and your hungry friends and family will be searching for the can opener.