Lost my Cooking Mojo

Why does dinner have to come every night?  Ugh.

I have been struggling with cooking dinner lately.  Either I'm just not in the mood to plan, prep, cook, and clean-up, or I do all of that and for some reason or another the food just doesn't turn out like it used to.  I'm in a cooking rut, a long one, it's going on a few months now.  It'd be nice if I could just give up dinners for a few weeks or a few months, but I can't.  Especially since I have kids to feed.  So my solution to this problem has been to make very simple and easy meals.

The other night I caved and made the kids chicken nuggets and tater tots.  Real kid friendly food.  Except they didn't eat it.  Matt and I ate spicy orange glazed salmon (one of the few nice recipes that still works for me), the kids weren't interested in that either.  There's been a lot of ravioli and meatballs (dylan eats the ravioli, aaron eats the meatballs), baked chicken, ordering out, and frozen pizza these days.  I'm sure they are all tired of it, because I definitely am.  But part of the problem is that I just can't think of much that everyone can and will eat, and I just don't have time to prepare anything since Aaron needs so much supervision.  Another part of the problem is that I don't have the energy and I am TIRED of doing it all the time.

And actually this extends beyond dinner...  breakfast and lunch are much the same.  The only difference is that I have known foods that the kids will eat.  But there is no variety, which I think is a problem.  Breakfast-- Toast with butter and fruit, Lunch-- Peanut butter sandwich (which Aaron has pretty much stopped eating).  Occasionally I can get Aaron to eat some yogurt, but that's about it.

So any super easy recipes that don't require many ingredients, don't take long to prep and cook, are kid friendly, don't contain red meat or garlic (matt doesn't eat that anymore) and are at least somewhat healthy and satisfying?  Because I am tapped out.

Comments

Tom said…
Since Let's Dish closed, we are about to start preparing meals a month or two in advance. So we'll get a bunch of meat and a recipe, and prepare it and freeze it into 4 - 6 meals. We kind of want to do it with other people to get more of a variety, so each family brings the ingredients for a meal, and then we can prepare it individually to our taste. Somehow we'd have to circulate the meals ahead of time to see how many families want each meal. Interested?
Jess said…
I'd definitely be interested. My concern is that we have a really small freezer that's already pretty full, so I'm not sure I have space to store tons of stuff. But I like the idea of having at least part of the meal done well in advanced, and if it's a shared effort it seems like it would be even easier (for everyone). Keep me in the loop with things, if you don't mind :)