Making Nikujaga

About a year and a half ago, when my wife's job was decided and our children were about to start daycare, we talked about how we would divide up the housework from then on.

Since we would both be busy, we decided that whoever got home earlier would make dinner, and if someone was working from home, they would naturally be the one to make it.

My wife's job is full-time and sometimes involves overtime, so to fill our hungry children's stomachs as quickly as possible, there was no other way for me to think about it than to make dinner myself.
And since my wife's job ended up involving more overtime than I had imagined, and I became able to work from home almost every day, it became a natural progression for me to take charge of our family's cooking.

It's not that I hadn't cooked before, but my cooking (what I called cooking) up until then was either simple dishes like hot pot or fried rice, where I could hide my sloppiness by calling it 'man's cooking,' or things I would get fired up about on my days off, saying, 'I'll make dinner today,' and spend a long time making something I looked up on Cookpad. My wife would even tell me, 'Watching you from the side, your lack of efficiency is frustrating.'
So, for a while after daycare started, we used a system where I would write the weekly menu on a whiteboard, and my wife would prepare a large amount of food on the weekend, freeze it, and I would just finish it off by frying or deep-frying it on the day. I was in a sweet spot where I was almost entirely assisted by my wife and only had to make the final, easy goal.

Along with my disastrous cooking skills, a major problem was my eldest daughter's picky eating.
At that time, the only things my eldest daughter would eat besides snacks were white rice, bread, udon, the breading on fried foods (barely, if it was chicken), and the white part of a fried egg. Is this a menu for an actor trying to gain weight in a short period of time for a role? She was putting all her nutritional intake into carbohydrates.
Come to think of it, for some reason she would eat raisins, but when I looked it up, I found out that raisins are also high in carbohydrates and calories. How stoically is she trying to prepare for a role?

About a week after the trial daycare period ended, I received a call that my eldest daughter hadn't eaten any of the daycare's lunch or snacks, so I went to pick her up.
Lunch that day was some kind of pasta dish without white rice, and the snack was something like kashiwa rice (chicken rice), so my eldest daughter couldn't touch any of it.
Seeing her devour snacks when we got home, I trembled with anxiety that I would be called in frequently from then on, but surprisingly, this was the only time I was called in because she wouldn't eat.
Thanks to the dedicated support of the daycare teachers, and perhaps because her survival instinct told her she had no choice but to eat, she gradually started to eat more things from then on.

With all that going on, while we were spending our days in a rush, before I knew it, both I and my eldest daughter had grown.
The other day, I asked my mother back home for her seasoning recipe and served nikujaga for dinner, and my wife told me, 'This is what I want to eat before I die.' For now, my wife's last meal would be the gyoza and nikujaga that I make. I hope that one day I can fill up her entire life's full course, like in Toriko.
My eldest daughter still has many things she can't eat, but she ate the carrots and shirataki in the nikujaga, and she even ate the shimeji mushrooms I added because she's been into them for some reason lately.
It's strange that she likes things with unique flavors like raisins, shimeji mushrooms, herb-roasted chicken, and coffee-flavored sweets, but she is increasing her favorite foods in her own way.

At the end of the year, I watched the drama 'What Did You Eat Yesterday?' on Amazon Prime.
No matter what happens, Shiro-san leaves work on time and makes dinner every day. And then he eats it with Kenji. The story just continues with that, but it's very healing and nice.
The scenes where Shiro-san cooks are great, and I made coleslaw the other day by imitating the show.
In the drama, Shiro-san says something like, 'Cooking gives you the same sense of accomplishment as finishing a big job. It's amazing that you can experience that every day.'
When I make dinner in a hurry during the busy weekdays and my family eats the food I made and says, 'This is delicious,' my heart is indeed filled.

I'm currently reading a cooking essay called 'Gyoza no Ongaeshi' (Repaying with Gyoza), and it's also very interesting. It's funny and even includes recipes, so I recommend it.
Watching cooking-related works boosts my energy to make something delicious, so it's good.