The execution may have been off, but the mother-in-law was on to something

I have often laughed at Hubby's stories of "Experimental Thursday", the night of the week when, in his childhood home, you needed to be busy.  Not just "pottering round the house" busy, not just "back a bit late" busy, but "miles away, no possibility of getting back for dinner" busy.  Why?  Because on Experimental Thursday,  Hubby's mum would cook something "new and exciting" in a bid to broaden her family's diet.

Now, I have never eaten my mother-in-law's cooking.  In the eight and a half years I have known her, she has never set foot in the kitchen in my presence to produce anything more challenging than a cup of tea, and even that needs to be approached with caution.  I'm not saying she's a bad cook.  Really I'm not.  But Hubby does, his sister does, and even my mother-in-law's boyfriend does, so I can only imagine that the colourful and highly entertaining tales of the inedible meals resulting from Experimental Thursday contain more than a small grain of truth.  My husband always laughs nervously when Zoe Wanamaker cooks in "My Family": for him the weird and wonderful combinations she concocts are not the exaggerated fantasies of script-writers but flashbacks to those fateful Thursday nights. The suggestion that dinner is "Tuna Surprise" is enough to make his blood run cold.

But the fact remains, Experimental Thursday is a good idea.  A great idea, even.  We could all do with broadening our food horizons.  It is all too easy to get stuck in a rut, making the same meals week in, week out, with the same ingredients.  We all know that the key to a healthy diet is variety, but it seems to take too much time and planning to actually achieve that.  We wander the supermarket on auto-pilot in whatever spare time we can find between work, kids and life in general, dropping the same things into the basket to be turned into the same old standbys each week.  We may not be quite as bad as our grandparents' generation, with each day of the week having its designated meal (fish on Fridays anyone?), but I am sure we would all concede that there is a pattern to our eating.

There is nothing wrong with patterns, with repetition. They are the rhythm of life. They create a feeling of home, safety and belonging. They also make life undeniably easier. In fact, sometimes they are the only way you can hold things together.  There is something truly wonderful about cooking a recipe that you know by heart and can be confident will be gobbled up with gratitude by your hungry brood.  But let's not do that every night of the week.  Let's be brave.  Let's take down the cookbooks from the shelves and, just one night a week, push the boat out and try something new.  It doesn't have to be wacky.  It doesn't have to be complicated or time consuming.  The only rule is that on Thursday nights, we will cook and eat something we have never made before. And with that spirit of adventure, Experimental Thursday was resurrected...