I had the perfect plan. I got everything for a waste-free lunch even down to the cloth napkins thanks to Etsy.com.

As someone who makes pizza dough by hand all day long, I was totally going to make everything from scratch, including the bread. Like I said, the perfect plan.

Well, hello reality. Look who just showed up!

As I unpacked the groceries on Sunday, I just stared in horror at my pantry filled with processed foods I had banned from my house long ago. Caramel corn rice cakes, store bought sliced bread, and jelly now sit on my shelves. How did this happen?

I’ll tell you how. I am a working mom just trying to figure out in the trenches how to make a healthy lunch that my daughter will eat. (Not because she is a picky eater but because her best friend tells her her lunch is gross everyday.)

I wish I could write that I will implement the perfect plan, but I won’t. My mantra as a mom has always been good enough and today I am reminded of that. Funny how I have to keep re-remembering that. This week’s lunch will be a compromise of homemade and store bought. That will have to be good enough.

I dug up an old recipe I posted last year listing 5 ideas for a brown bag lunch using pizza dough. I’ll make something from here for next week. Good enough, for now anyway.

My mom likes to tell the story of when I was a teenager making my lunch. As I was heating a hot dog in the microwave, I turned to our dog and proudly announced “Kim’s a cook’n!”

My mother laughs when she tells this story, but where does she think I got the idea from? While my grandmother cooked and baked almost everything from scratch (her homemade doughnuts are legendary), my mother did most of her cooking from a box and used the microwave more and more as the years went on. By the time I started in the kitchen, I continued the downward spiral from scratch cooking to assembling and heating.

Michael Pollan discusses this decline in cooking in his most recent article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. A food-marketing researcher explains how years ago people killed, plucked and gutted a chicken before they cooked it. Who would do that today? (Okay, I know some people who still do but not on a regular basis.) He claims our grandchildren will think that cooking something for dinner is as crazy as starting with killing a chicken. On the cooking spectrum ranging from scratch to reheating, our society seems to be moving more and more toward the reheating end. You can see the end of cooking from here.

Gosh, I sure hope not. For myself, I stopped the downward progression. Over the years I have learned to cook by watching my mother-in-law and her mother-in-law and by being willing to make oh so many mistakes. Now that I am almost 40 and have a family of my own, I cook almost every night and I don’t even own a microwave.

But the question remains, what does it mean to cook? I can only define it for myself. I strive to cook from scratch as much as possible, but I am willing to use shortcuts if need be. Cooking for my family is a balancing act made up of day-to-day choices as to where to draw the line between scratch cooking and convenience. I make all birthday cakes from scratch. I get a CSA box of vegetables from a local farm and challenge myself to use everything. (Sweet corn ice cream anyone?) I eat Fritos.

In order to srike the right balance, I focus on my pantry. If I have items like flour and yeast, I can make bread, usually in my bread maker. If I have rice, beans, a can of tuna, I am all set to add some sauteed vegetables and call it a casserole. The trick is to have items for scratch cooking as well as shortcut items. I have both canned and dried beans, instant rice and regular. If I have time and plan ahead, I cook from scratch, otherwise, I open a can or boil a bag.

I do draw some hard lines. I have never bought a ready-to-eat meal that you simply reheat in the oven. I always make my own breadcrumbs and stock for example. I keep them both in the freezer. The convenience forms of these foods are too processed for my taste.

I am always negotiating with myself as to where to find the balance and am proud of my progression from microwaved hot dogs to homemade doughnuts. I am currently teaching my 5-year-old daughter how to make my grandmother’s doughnuts so she doesn’t have to start as far back as I did. I don’t know where she will find herself on the cooking spectrum but I am hoping she will not find cooking crazy.

Do you cook?  If so, how? And, what does cooking mean to you?