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?

My meal plan is a rolling monthly plan. We have a different meal every night of the month. So I don't think about it at all. On a Sunday I flip over the meal plan, the weeks meals are there, I make a list buy the food, who ever is home first cooks it. It has meant I never think about what's for dinner, I come home and it's either cooking or I look at the plan and cook it.
Every 6 months I switch it up a bit add recipes I fancy

TheSandman - do you cook for the whole family every night?

I think I'd think it was fun if I didn't have to do it every single fucking night for the last 17 years

I hate it all too.
My days off are all about shopping for food and thinking about what to do with it

Its rubbish

During the first lockdown it was the lunches which pushed me over the edge too, that’s when I abdicated all responsibility for them and just made sure we had basics like bread, ham and cheese in at all times. I can do that because DD is almost a teenager though, impossible to do with small children.

Couldn't agree more. I've been keeping running lists of our online orders, so I know all the staples we go through in a week, and that's easy enough. I've decided that weekday lunches are either soup or sandwiches, but even just the process of deciding on a week's worth of dinners and working out what we need to make them is tedious.

DD is very picky and would choose crackers, cheese and fruit for her dinner every night if we let her; I somehow feel obliged to try to get her to eat a more varied diet, even though it makes us both miserable. I'm also contending with first trimester tiredness and I just CBA most of the time. This week DH has been away for 3 days so I meal prepped all my lunches and dinners before he went, so I didn't have to do any cooking/cleaning and it has been an absolute blessing. I used to love food and cooking, but this year has just worn me out and I can't bear it any more.

@ArabellaPilkington

TheSandman - do you cook for the whole family every night?

I think I'd think it was fun if I didn't have to do it every single fucking night for the last 17 years

I can't hand on heart say every night - we will occasionally have a chip supper from the chippy or forage the freezer for something to zap but 95% of the time, yes. I do. I like it. It fills me with a great sense of well-being when they like what I've made for them.

@CatrinVennastin I also have a Scottish male to cook for and it's not a "proper meal" unless it involves some kind of meat and preferably potatoes (I find potatoes dull unless it's a roast dinner someone else has cooked well). Everything else is just a "snack". Aargh!!!

I don’t mind cooking and baking but years and years of this has sucked all the joy out of it.

I tried to mix it up with one new recipe per week, but I just lost the will to live with it, so back to pesto chicken and pasta.

He doesn’t like this, other one doesn’t like that. Why do we have to have pasta every night!

DCs were out with their dad on Sunday, I had a cheese toastie for my tea. Cooked and in my belly in 10 minutes. Sooooo much better than the slog over a Sunday roast.

Oh I need to join you. I hate cooking, would be quite happy with beans on toast most nights. DP is great and does his fair share but, how can I put it, he’s just not very good (Everything too hot and sloppy) and I end up saying you’re all right love, I’ve got this.

Plus I’ve got an entire family of vegetarians who don’t really like vegetables.

Would love to do this gusto thing...

We had the same 7 meals every week when I was a kid and you didn't even talk about likes and dislikes, you ate what was put in front of you. I think some return in part at least would help a lot of the people posting on here today. We had a roast dinner Sunday, followed by salad at tea time. Monday- Thurs would be a cheap cut of meat such as breast of lamb, belly pork, gammon steaks, stew, with boiled potatoes and veg followed by a pud which involved custard. Friday was fish and chips from the chip shop (I only ever wanted a few chips in a slice of buttered white bread), Saturday my dad cooked beans on toast or similar (my favourite meal of the week incidentally).

I did throw my toys oot the pram when we first started living together (both can wfh, have done for years with intermittent travelling) and he asked "what's for lunch". Whatever you're making for yourself was the swift retort. I didn't mind doing tea as my hours were usually shorter and more flexible, and then we had dc, but fuck making lunch for a grown ass man just because! Especially since he liked lunch at 12 and I like mine at 2.

@passthemustard

I feel like it takes up my entire life. Plan, food, shop for food, cook food, clear up food. It's relentless.

Plus the daily shouts of there's no food, there's nothing to eat, what can I eat, when are you going shopping! 😩

Make it stop

This sums up my life too, especially the "there's nothing to eat" cry!

I also have a Scottish male to cook for and it's not a "proper meal" unless it involves some kind of meat and preferably potatoes

I don't think that's an exclusively Scottish thing. My (English) dad was like that. Used to shove a bucketful of salt on everything before he even tasted it too which I find really weird. He died a few years ago now and my mum hardly eats any meat at all these days - she feels a lot happier for it.

If it wasn't that I have children to feed I think I'd just have given up on eating and left DH to fend for himself.

I'm on mat leave at the moment so doing all the cooking (although no idea why that means I'm doing all the cooking when he's wfh and finishes at 4, but it's better than spending more time with the kids I suppose). In normal times he does most of the weekday cooking because I get home later, but I still have to meal plan and shop, tell him what to cook each day, tell him how to cook it, and if it's something that takes a bit longer like a curry then I cook it the night before and he just reheats it and cooks rice. I don't mind the actual cooking it's just the bloody mental drain.

We did have a four weekly meal plan for a little while. Takes a bit of working out but then means you just pick the appropriate shopping list for that week and away you go, no further thought required. We only planned 6 meals per week so there was scope for trying new recipes, takeaway, eating elsewhere etc. Got bored in the end, but was good for a while. Should do it again really, maybe after Christmas.

Problem is that leftovers are totally unpredictable as the kids (2 and 5) eat like birds or locusts without any predictable pattern, which then throws the next day off too.

Add in being lucky to get what was on the meal plan let alone with the right dates plus random shit happening and DHs unpredictable work patterns I can't have a stable pattern of meals

I hear you.
I used to be an enthusiastic cook. Then I had DC2. She's fussy, and very suspicious of "new" foods or combinations. The other day I saw an idea for salmon with pesto on top of a gratin of beans - ALL things she likes - but because it was "new" she barely touched it. I am stuck with a limited repertoire of acceptable meals, as I am too lazy to cook twice, and refuse to go down the nugget and chips route as I fear she'll be even more limited then, and get scurvy.

I also get irritated by DH's response when I moan about how bored of it all I am. He'll invariably grab a cookbook and point out something Mastercheffy and say "well this looks nice" and I have to point out that it takes 4 hrs prep and no-one likes 50% of the ingredients. I just need him to say "yes, it's shit, have some wine".

DH and I have been watching Masterchef the Professionals. So far I've added Croque Monsieur and potato Rosti to my menu. Anything that looks remotely doable, we've been making a mental note of and I'll give it a shot. But obviously it'll be HUGELY dumbed down version and I'll cook my meat instead of having it still clucking, quacking, baahing or mooing!!

I hate hate HATE meal planning. And I don't have the recipe for "Whatever you like" or "I dunno". Or worst: "Whatever's easy". Easy is having a plan. Easy is knowing what I need to cook. Easy is not having to do the mental load of deciding what everyone is going to eat.

Oh I am right there with you Op I could have written this I am going out of my mind with the tedium of it after 18+ years. There are no good take always near me I can't abide the supermarket take away type stuff. I've got us booked at a gastro pub as soon as they are letting us in. I am a good cook but my ds is very set in his ways and I can't be bothered cooking twice.....arrrrrggggggghhhhhhhhhhjjj........

I fed my kids pot noodles last night as just could not be arsed cooking. Looks like they survived

I used to love meal planning, it gave me a real sense of satisfaction, and I had it down to a fine art. I also love cooking and baking.

I just cannot be arsed with it recently. I don't know if it's because my youngest is at an awkward age-too big to be popped into a sling but too little to entertain herself when I cook - or whether it's because of Covid and having to do all the dinners and lunches because everyone is home all the time and DH is out working 12 hours a day - but I just cannot be arsed

Absolutely a total drudge and time consuming.

@BookShark your planner sounds amazing - could I ask where it's from?

I'm definitely in the "over meal planning now" camp, need to change things up a bit but cba!

It's this one.

www.personalplanner.com/EN/planner_editor/

You can get all kinds of inserts (I have a very satisfying track of all the books I've read this year!) but this will be the first time I've tried the meal planner one.

It's the same approach as DD's school take two their lunches though (I think theirs is a 4 week cycle) so no reason why it shouldn't work!

Used to drive me mad.

Now we take it in turns to cook. Usually cook enough for at least two or three meals, so plenty of leftovers/stuff to freeze.

After a while it builds up, so plenty of days off cooking for us both. Especially we also both do one batch cook a month of four or five meals for the freezer.

On average we both cook from scratch a couple of times a week. Means I’ve gotten back the urge to spontaneously do fancy meals from time to time, mostly at weekends.

I hate it so much.

I hate shopping for food.
I hate planning meals for a week.
I hate the meal prep.
I hate the cooking.
I hate the washing up.

Like I know we should have a healthy meal every day, but every dinner time I look at the food to be prepped and think, "oh why the fuck didn't I just buy chips and nuggets?"

I'd just live on toast and maybe the occasional day meal if it were only me. It's not like the food beings any joy anyway, my family are all fussy eaters and I'm not making everyone different meals, so instead we just have the same 7-8 meals over and over, week in week out.