So fucking bored of meal planning!

[bingowingsmcgee]

Anyone else just find the whole meal-making thing deadly dull?! I am so bored of thinking about food, shopping for food, preparing food... Wish I could find some joy in it, but it just feels Neverending. Anyone else?

Yes, it's so bloody tedious. And my kids are only 4 and 1 so I have many, many years ahead of me yet 😩

I normally love food but trying to accommodate for fussy eaters is a nightmare.

It isn't just the what's for tea question, it's the timing. I DON'T FUCKING KNOW, IVE JUST HAD BREAKFAST.
and repeat at lunch, when they get in from School/ college / work because every person must ask the same damn question.
They can even sit in the kitchen, as I prepare tea and STILL ask what's for tea.
I hate tea
I hate meal planning

Yep the planning, cooking, cleaning up cycle is really getting to me now. It doesn’t help that DS likes to take a food flask to school with hot food in so I have to prepare that with his breakfast. It’s usually only reheating but it creates extra pans that need cleaning up. The dishwasher is going on 3 times a day at the moment and there’s only 3 of us! DH and I are WFH and to be fair, he is working non stop but he’s taken to asking “what’s for lunch?” everyday 😡. Like I need an extra meal to plan for!

Yep. Used to love cooking before kids now it's a total drudge catering for the kids' dislike of new stuff.

Also frustrated by shops not having good vegetables (possibly a regional thing) and I really miss my 2nd freezer so we could buy lamb by the half for less than the cost of 2 leg joints in the supermarket.

I subscribe to Gousto and HelloFresh. Pick whichever has the best options for a particular week and skip the week on the other. That's most of the weekly meals covered.

Dd1 decided to become a pescatarian a few months ago and as my repertoire of fish and veggie meals was piss poor we decided to try Gousto. Honestly it was the best decision I think I have made all year. We are eating better than we have ever done before. Absolutely delicious meals that I was never in a million years have contemplated making. Last night we had a baked sesame tofu thing with roasted kale and a cucumber salad. OMG it was amazing and this is coming from someone who has previously had a severe case of the heebie-her idea when confronted by tofu.
Four nights a week we have a great meal that I don’t need to think about bar getting out the recipe and making it.
Total game changer.

Heebie-jeebies

I get the what's for dinner question every day from my youngest who is 14 and every day I respond and unless its chips and something to means.

Yep. Me too. My parents moved in with us back in March before lockdown 1 as mum needs fairly full time care and dad was struggling to look after himself. I now cook for 6 people pretty much every day.

Mum is trying to eat really healthily.
Dad has no teeth so cannot chew any meat and is nervous of fish.
Dh eats everything (thank god!)
DD (12) will not eat fish or 'spice'.
DS (10) is vegetarian.

I'm either trying to find one meal which more or less works for everyone (so far only roast dinner which ds and dad have without meat, and pasta with optional meatballs) or cooking 4 variations a night.

When this is over I'm going to a hotel on my own for a week!

I hate it! Have been using Gousto since October. However am about to take a break from employment so will be stopping Gousto for a while but using the recipe cards I have kept from it so will just pick from those which I am hoping will make it easier!

YY to it all.
It has got worse since Covid.
DH is now at home at lunchtimes and even though I tell him the cut off time for the delivery, remind him of the cut off time for delivery he will still forget and mournfully look into the fridge at lunchtime and declare there is nothing to eat (oh the rage that a grown man can not organise food for himself).
My DC are small so I have to think about breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks - particularly at weekends and in the holidays.
It is just relentless.
Some nights I can't even face eating what I have cooked.
I meal plan and get a food delivery every 5 days or so but this means I am either planning a shop, putting a shop away, booking the next slot, cooking or tidying up.
At least before Covid we would eat out a few times a month, visit family and have a meal there but this is constant 7 days a week stuff.
DH does cook but only a meal I have planned and shopped for and only at the weekend. I have told him he is organising Christmas as I am DONE.

Anecdata- my mum does not cook. Unless she can pierce a film or shove a tray in an oven she is not interested. I used to find it odd as she was the quintessential mum who would have a solid meal on the table each night as we were growing up. I completely get it now. Completely.

It's all so bloody boring. I'd rather have a sandwich than cook these days.

I don't cook on a Friday now, it can be beans on toast, boiled eggs, takeaway etc, I don't care but I'm not cooking. The kids call it 'neglectful tea Fridays'

I love it! I'm on Slimming World so it's a way of life now, I'm planned to the end of this month so I can make sure I stay on plan and within food budget. I'd feel a bit lost if I went 'freestyle' now

because if you dont cook, they will eat the food you had earmarked for another day and ruin any plans you may have had, causing you to go to the dreaded shops! meal planning is bad enough without throwing that into the equation

There is only ds 13 and I and he's finally less picky. I've started buying some real but lazy things like Tesco's finest hunters chicken and katsu chicken. It's raw but ready seasoned etc so that goes into the oven and some veg in a pan and microwave rice at the last minute. Bonus is the expiration dates tell me when to cook which.

That's a couple of meals taken care of. Another is frozen fish again with veg and rice. Some weeks I'll make a stew. Yesterday I made a pasta bake. Sometimes a friend rice dish.

Ds sorts himself out (instant noodles, pasta, eggs etc) one or two evenings a week and I only do one meal a day on weekends and the rest is up to him.

It was hellish when he was younger but light is shining at the end of the tunnel.

My life seems to have been revolving around food constantly since March.

I feel like I'm either writing lists for food, shopping for food or cooking food and it's not helped by the fact we only have a tiny freezer with no space for another. I'm absolutely sick of eating in date order rather than what I fancy but I'm spending a fortune on food we're not really enjoying.

This week, we are going back to basics in the run up to Christmas with things like scrambled eggs on toast, jacket potatoes and homemade vegetable soup. I'm also getting the sandwich toaster out again as we all seem to forget how tasty, cheap and easy they are when it's at the back of the cupboard!

I now have a spreadsheet and a Trello board with pinned recipes, which do help. But it’s still a big, fat, tedious chore.

I’ve tried the six week rotation thing and it never works. Something always comes up: DH working late, someone ill, whatever, that means I always have to go off piste and that stuffs it all up. And it’s so boring.

I hear you. Meal planning is one of the few things which makes me miss the single and child free life. I don’t want to feed everyone, I want to make myself cheese on toast and eat it in front of the TV. I can’t even do the subscription box thing because DD is a fussy eater and DH only eats one meal a day so he eats a lot, he’d eat an entire subscription box by himself (I know how bad this is, but he’s not going to change his ways).

I flatly refuse to make anyone lunch now, or even think too much about whether we’ve got lunch stuff in (we always have bread, cheese, ham and so on). We live two minutes from a small supermarket, if you can’t find anything you want to eat in the house you’re free to go to the shop.

Found my people. The "what's for tea?" question drives me nuts, especially when asked in the morning. Dcs can, and do, often cook for themselves but have yet to master the art of cleaning up after themselves! Now I'm trying to think whats for tea and its not even 8.30!

Yes - it’s the endless thinking what to have, rather than the actual cooking.
It would help to have a repertoire written down. Mine - if I had ever bothered to make one - would be in the front of my recipe file.

Not to mention some cupboard-and-freezer easy standbys for when you CBA to think or do more than very basic cooking.
One of mine is a tin of condensed mushroom soup + tin of tuna + pasta + frozen peas.

We’ve got three weeks worth of meal plans in rotation. Three weeks without the same meal feels long enough to not get bored and there’s no more thinking involved.

I love it.... I love cooking/looking at new things/trying new stuff

No one fussy here to cook for though which I imagine is a huge help.

I find meal planning is OK for a while when single, but such a chore when trying to cook for a family.

"I'll cook xyz"
"Oh, so and so doesn't like beans"
"OK, I'll cook abc"
"Ah, wotsit doesn't eat mushrooms"
"Oh FFS" 🙄😬😠

Same. I plan on Sunday afternoon, do the shop online then. When the food arrives on Monday, I write down what we’ll be eating each day based on use by dates on whatever has been delivered, and I don’t think about it again.

Anyone asking what’s for dinner gets pointed at the list.

saturday we had roasted cauliflower and prawn curry, sunday we had good old favourite lentil spaghetti,with bacon on the side for those who eat meal and yesterday we had Caribbean rice and beans

@Skipsurvey, I like the sound of the curry! Do you have the recipe please?