I subscribe to the feed for a cooking blog called How to Cook Like Your Grandmother. The trend in kitchens has been swinging in this direction for a while, away from mixes and pre-made frozen foods, back into cooking from scratch. Once in a while, when I’m just not capable of cooking (for whatever reason) we’ll go back to the old frozen pizza. Most of the time, though, we make the effort to put something good on the table and into our bodies.

Chuck was exhausted from a weekend of travel. Amigo was happy and tired from a weekend of travel. I was a little better off, but not much, just ten days out from a very scary and exhausting hospital experience. I’m still scrubbing off the bandage marks.

To put supper on the table, Chuck went out to do a whirlwind grocery shopping trip. Bunny food, a few other necessities, and a fully cooked rotisserie chicken were on his list. Meanwhile, back at the O.K. Chorale, I grabbed some frozen corn (frozen last summer when it was fresh), a small container of frozen red and green peppers, and tossed all of this into the steamer to cook. Somehow, even as wrecked as we felt, we put a decent meal on for supper.

Afterwards, I took a few minutes to be inspired by How to Cook Like Your Grandmother, a post still sitting in my inbox. . Tired, but not willing to quit quite yet, I took the bones from the chicken, the veggie water from the steamer, and a couple pieces of onion and I made a chicken broth. I had to be in the kitchen making lunch for tomorrow, so I rationalized I might as well get a broth simmering while I worked.

It was worth it. The broth looked thick and tasty, I got my lunch packed and a couple of options onto Amigo’s shelf in the refrigerator, and then diced up a little lettuce and tomato for the next night’s tacos.

When I’m tired and running almost on empty, sometimes I make the best use of my time. When everything is said and done, I can relax and go to bed knowing I’ve put in a good effort to feed the family and we didn’t even need to resort to frozen pizza – yet.