A Forgiving Dinner That’ll Get You Back Into Cooking

In The Fourth Trimester, we ask parents: What meal nourished you after welcoming your baby? This month it’s a vegetable-forward farro from NPR editor Leah Donnella.

Before I got pregnant I had always imagined pregnancy to be vaguely glamorous. Lush hair and dewy skin, debonair strangers offering you their seat on the train, and delightfully offbeat cravings: ice cream and pickles, nachos with whipped cream at 2 a.m. But my first pregnancy unfurled more like a horror movie. My mood was the first to go. After learning the news I sobbed every day for a month. Next came the nausea and exhaustion. Suddenly, I was too tired to cry. I had to eat almost constantly to stave off the worst symptoms, but the thought of most foods made my stomach turn.

There were a few exceptions. At first all I wanted was pineapple; I ate so much it made my mouth bleed. I couldn’t get enough chocolate layer cake after that. One morning I woke up ready to sell my soul to the devil for a McDonald’s hashbrown. And the whole time I wanted to cook like I wanted to be in a roomful of wasps.

That loss particularly vexed me. Until getting pregnant, I used to say I loved to cook. But my relationship with cooking had been frictionless. I was the kind of person who would whip up a batch of “just-in-case” shortbread dough while taking a work call, then roll my eyes at people who talked about not having time to cook. I was that friend, I’m sorry to say, who goes on three dates and starts writing a book about the secret to cultivating a perfect relationship.

For a while I held out hope that my symptoms were temporary. My doctor promised the nausea would be gone by 16 weeks. Mine hung on until about 23. For a few blissful days I was starting to feel better. Then I found out I had gestational diabetes.

A very nice specialist sent me some sample menus for vegetarians. Breakfast: nonfat yogurt with nuts and half an avocado. Lunch: hummus, whole wheat pita, and carrots sticks. Dinner: “yummy” chickpea soup with black beans and half an avocado. I tested my blood sugar four times a day. Lentils spiked my glucose level. So did farro, sweet potatoes, oatmeal, brown rice. From September until December I didn’t cook so much as concoct science experiments. Would Ezekial toast with natural peanut butter get me a good reading? What about a green apple with walnuts? At a certain point I felt more machine than human, my body simply converting garbanzo beans into stem cells.

Before my son arrived I had always imagined giving birth to be vaguely celestial. Two beings connected by an eternal bond, instantly overwhelmed with an abiding love and devotion to each other. Instead, I held this weird, wet creature that looked like an owl and thought, Where the hell did he come from? All I wanted was to sleep. I had no idea what it would mean to love him.

In the hours, days, and months to come, I had to learn. It was brutal. Love was pacing up and down the hall, bouncing that baby in my arms at 3 a.m. while he screamed. It was hunching in a chair, wincing as we learned how to nurse. It was changing diapers and onesies, and endless vigils to make sure he was still breathing in his bassinet. Mixed into all of that, there was also transcendence. Hearing him sneeze for the first time. Watching him realize his hand was his hand. Bringing him outside to discover raindrops.

As this was unfolding, I found myself wanting to cook again. Maybe it was because I wanted my child’s infancy to be filled with all the beauty I could summon, including the smells of a homemade dinner. Maybe it was because I craved anything familiar to remind me of who I had been before. Maybe I was just sick of all the takeout. I’m not sure. There’s a line in an E.E. Cummings poem that my husband quotes often: “forgetting why, remember how.” So I started relearning how to cook. That first night in the kitchen again, I focused on the how.

Pour olive oil into a pan. Chop an onion and throw it in. The baby started crying, or maybe I realized I had to pump. I left the room. I remembered the onions when I smelled them burning. That was okay. I had eaten worse things than burnt onions. I threw some mushrooms in the pan, left, and came back. The mushrooms were fine. What else did we have? Some rosemary, a sweet potato. I threw those in, with some red pepper flakes. Sprinkled salt on everything. What next? Rice was too finicky. Eggs too quick. I poured in a bag of farro (a food I associate with being overcook-proof) and doused everything in vegetable broth. There.

I hadn’t been inspired. I hadn’t tried to fall back in love. I had executed the mundane tasks that make cooking, cooking. And I still ended up with a meal. It landed somewhere between a mushroom risotto and a sweet potato paella, I thought a bit smugly. Hearty, savory, patient. Even if by accident.

I’m too new to motherhood to say what it actually is, but so far, it’s been so much more about doing than knowing. At no point in the past year have I felt quite the way I expected. If you ask me how I fell in love with my son, I will say it was like trying to follow a simple recipe the first time I ever cooked on my own. I did the things people told me to do, and what they said would happen, happened.

Learning how to love my baby helped me learn how to approach cooking again. The truth was that I had been taking this relationship for granted—confusing ease and fun with love. Returning to the kitchen was complicated. Sometimes it involved chopping and simmering and defrosting and baking. Sometimes it involved toasting a piece of bread before I dipped it straight into a tub of cream cheese while trying not to get crumbs on my baby’s head. And sometimes I left something on the stove for 20 minutes too long, only to marvel at the fact that—oh right!—onions just get better the longer you let them go.

I don’t know if I would call this new relationship love. But these days my weird, funny, miraculous, still often inexplicably damp baby is finally getting to eat what I cook. And what I feel watching him do that is something else entirely.