do i have dinner cheat nights?

short answer: yes — mama needs a break and it’s called ‘fake-out take-out’

HEADS UP: I will be temporarily keeping all Lovingly Made issues free for the month of January, as I explore writing about some different topics. Then, starting February 1, all issues (besides a few favorites) will be paywalled 21 days after posting.

Upgrade your subscription to paid to have year-round access to all issues, plus other paid subscriber perks such as: pantry consultations, recipe help, virtual cooking classes, etc. Reach out to me through a direct message on Substack or email me at sarah.acookinyourkitchen@gmail.com with any questions, requests for the above perks, etc. My mission here is to help you, so let’s get your home kitchens kitchening.

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My apologies for the slight lateness of this issue — work and life stuff picked up after the holidays, and I’m not used to that. The life of a freelancer (in more than one field) never stops. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

Because this time of year (January through early April) is for farms in the Midwest to go through their annual slow time, this quarter’s issues of the newsletter will be devoted to making the most out of this dreary-ass season.

Topics will include things such as:

• a project where i work through my cookbooks and see if my 3-year-old approves

• my methodologies to food sourcing and meal planning

• working through my freezers

• books that i’m reading (about food or the culinary world)

• the social importance of a cooking/supper club

Don’t worry, plenty of recipes will still be coming your way, just a little less of the “fresh out the garden” variety.

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There is incredible beauty in living in a place that has seasons. Like 4 distinct seasons. My husband and I talk about this all the time — he is from California, and I am from Missouri. We met at music school in Indiana almost 14 years ago (sorry what is time?) and learned so much about each other’s lived experiences and the differences between the West Coast and the Midwest. The Bay Area especially has an incredibly different vibe. It’s amazing, but I can’t really imagine myself living there year-round — mainly because it’s missing the seasonal extremes, and therefore, rhythms that I find incredibly important for how I process time. (Sadly, climate change has kind of fucked this up for me and literally everyone else. It used to snow December through March, but now it never truly feels like Winter until January, and only if the weather decides to be consistent. It could be 70 degrees in 2 weeks, as far as I know, and I’m upset about it.) Yes, every place has some sense of seasonal changes, but California is just not a place that has the stark contrasts from spring to summer to autumn to winter like the Midwest has.

Wherever you’re located, eating seasonally gives you a cycle to help ground your sense of time. In Midwestern America, there’s just less fresh produce to buy in the winter. We are lucky to have a market with farmers that can keep produce coming almost all the way through the year, so the local supply is never totally deprived. But, let me tell you, it can get real close. As I talked about in my New Year’s post, this season evokes almost an animalistic instinct to hibernate (hard to do in today’s world), so my advice to you is to survive the darker winter times by balancing out your cooking strategies with your need to live an easier, cozier life.

Working thoughtfully with the seasons can do interesting things for your budget — meaning maybe you can put some money away for the spring and summer when the farmers market produce is bountiful, make things for your freezer, then (theoretically) spend less in the winters. It’s a beautiful little cyclical budgeting trick. That’s what my little Squirreling It Away series is about.

Now, it sounds like I might have a *little touch* of seasonal affective disorder (aka SAD; and believe it or not, these used to be my initials before I got married, and it was sometimes just as depressing)… but what I’m getting at is that cooking can brighten your world and make your house feel cozy during these dull, grey times.

What I’m also getting at is that with less of the fresh local produce around, leftovers can sometimes be at a minimum, and maybe you don’t have as much stowed away in your freezer as you’d like — this season can also be one of “Cheat Nights.”

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So let’s start off this slow winter season slowly with the concept of Cheat Nights.

I’m sure most of us are familiar with the term “Cheat Day” as the one day of the week when you can deviate from the strict diet that you might be on. You don’t care about counting calories, you go out to eat, just one day a week that you get to sin and ask for forgiveness the next 6 days. Personally, I don’t find this to be a healthy eating pattern because it relies on a pretty extreme form of discipline, which is unsustainable for almost everyone on the planet. Except for people like, idk, the Dalai Lama??

So Cheat Nights are not that, not this terribly restrictive thing that probably stemmed from some Puritan ideal to get people to hate themselves and make money off of it.

Instead, what I’m talking about is this: what I’m learning as a parent of a preschooler is that making food from scratch all the time is really fucking hard. It’s just a fact. I do have a hard time making nutritional compromises with myself, but I do the from-scratch lifestyle probably 85% of the time. Like, yes, I will take a solid B average during this season of my life. Busy as a 🐝 and getting busier — it’s getting harder to put the from-scratch stuff on the table 100% of the time, but I’m figuring it out as I go. Much to my chagrin, perfection is not attainable, and I need to give myself grace and a fucking break sometimes.

I end up balancing out my efforts in the kitchen by putting a few more Cheat Nights in our schedule during the winter. We either go out to eat at a restaurant (very rare, like 2x / month?) or make what I call… 🥁 … FAKE-OUT TAKE-OUT.

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WTF is Fake-Out Take-Out?

Fake-Out Take-Out happens probably 1x / week in our house. My hot take on takeout is that takeout sucks. Most of it. At least in Indianapolis, the takeout / delivery scene from restaurants makes me sad, and I end up just cooking the majority of our meals. Time for a classic parental phrase: I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.

But this is real life, and I have to balance what I know about food + nutrition with what’s going to help me stay a sane + nice mommy. And our budget — eating out is expensive, y’all. So Fake-Out Take-Out is about shopping the ready-made, frozen food aisles, looking for the products that maybe aren’t the greatest for your physical health, but might help your mental health, one dinner at a time.

So below is a list of my absolute favorites for those nights when you JUST. CAN. NOT. Or maybe you “can” a little bit and make a super easy cold vegetable side to put that nagging nutrition monster at ease.

Panang Curry (for mom and dad, after bedtime)

Now, this one is a banger. I didn’t make it for a long time because it was a major priority for us to eat all of our meals together as a family, especially for all of the time between our son starting solid foods and going off to school. Anything spicy is his mortal enemy, but he still keeps trying it — he’s a bit of a glutton for punishment, which I guess is true of any lover of capsaicin 🌶️🔥❤️ But now we have lunchtime back in our control for 5 days a week: HELLO LEFTOVERS.

All you need is:

• chicken breast / firm tofu (cubed / cut into bite-size pieces)

• panang curry paste [LINK] (I swear by the Maesri brand pictured below)

• coconut milk (Chao Koh is my fave brand 👍 it’s not too thinned out like Thai Kitchen 👎)

• cooked rice (long-grain, brown rice sourced from SE Asia or California for lower arsenic levels)

• sliced onions + sliced bell peppers (added after cooking the protein about halfway, cook until tender but not too soft)

This is probably your “healthiest” Fake-Out Take-Out option. All pretty much whole foods, including the curry paste ingredient list (minus the sugar, salt, mysterious “spices” listing, and citric acid), which is pretty awesome for a shelf-stable curry paste.

Follow the directions on the container. Look up your measurement conversions. This stuff will not steer you wrong.

Frozen Pizzas from Costco (the most obvious Cheat Night)

So unfortunately, my favorite frozen pizza was gone from Costco on our most recent trip 😭 and I’m pretty devastated because these things are DOPE. Best frozen pizzas on the planet. They even made me swear to never get pizza delivery again.

We decided to give these boxes a shot, and they just didn’t compare. SAD (there are those initials again…) The ingredient lists for frozen pizzas are generally pretty terrible, so these were always reserved for emergency dinners.

Dumpling Night (for those times you just don’t want to leave the house but have an intense craving for dumplings)

We’ve tried various frozen dumplings, primarily from Costco and Whole Foods. These are kind of hit or miss, but are worth trying to search for your own favorites. We haven’t found ours yet, but the ones below will still do the trick. When choosing between microwaving and steaming: go for steaming if you have the tools available. A stock pot with a steamer basket is worth every penny for everything between making broth, giant batches of soup, and of course, Dumpling Night.

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Whether your new year has started slow or off like a rocket, this is my hope for you in Winter 2025: to have comfy, cozy food on the standby when you need it most, whether it’s homemade and extremely healthy or a Cheat Night 😘

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for being here.

❤️ Sarah