When I started this “Week Without," I knew that I’d have to change my habit of eating a few meals out during the week. And since I was worried what that would mean for my social life (and because I was concerned that I’d end up eating every meal by myself), I decided to invite some friends over for dinner tonight. I asked them all to bring a contribution to the meal, either something to drink (grapes have been fermented into wine for centuries, right?) or a dish made with as many unprocessed ingredients as they could handle, so that I wasn’t the only one doing the cooking.

That said, I still spent over two hours last night (actually, it maybe have been a full three, I kind of lost track of time) preparing. I was determined to make two dishes without buying more groceries, which meant I relied on pantry staples like whole grains, dried beans and flour. I made a bulgur salad with black-eyed peas and arugula with a lemony vinaigrette, plus rosemary focaccia with caramelized onions and cherry tomatoes (shown above—I'll post more pictures and the recipes here tomorrow.) I also have a big cantaloupe to share.

The focaccia was an enormous challenge. I’d venture to say that I’m an excellent kneader—I’ve kneaded a decent amount of bread and pasta dough by hand over the past few years since I don’t have a stand mixer or a full size food processor—but man it was tough. I’m not sure exactly what was up, but I had to use both hands and really put my body weight into it. I was really worried that I'd done something wrong.

Thankfully, after all of that work (including two separate hour and a half long rises) with the dough, and the chopping and caramelizing, it looks pretty amazing. And I'm very excited to know that I can makes something I didn’t realize I could! But this type of cooking is not exactly sustainable, at least not on a weeknight.

I, like most people, would always prefer to have friends over on the weekend (August proved to be a challenge since most people were going to be out of town this weekend), but I think this helps explain why the amount of time we devote to cooking has decreased so dramatically while our reliance on pre-made foods has gone up.

Here’s a quick look at what my day looked like yesterday:

6 a.m.-7:30 yoga 7:30-8:15 getting ready, eating breakfast 8:15-8:30 rode bike to work 8:30-6:30 work 7-10:30 made food for tonight, managed to make dinner and sit down and eat it, made lunch for today, talked to my mom while doing more cooking and did a personal blog post for today.

Here’s what went out the window while I spent my evening in the kitchen: I totally spaced that I’d promised to read a friend’s book proposal for the second day in a row, I forgot to call a different friend back that I’d meant to, and I put off responding to two emails from family members again. Once I got into bed at 11, I was so tired that I couldn’t imagine reading to unwind, but I was pretty keyed up from all of the activity that it took me a while to fall asleep. I can’t imagine what this picture would look like if I had a family or other outside responsibilities.

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