People who love cooking for their families every single bloody day……

[Zippidydoodah]

…..and I’m sure there must be someone out there! 😜

Please could you inspire me? All I feel is seething resentment and verging on rage that I have to cook every. Single. Night.

I’ve tried “dump bags”- horrible name but amazing concept- nobody liked them.

The kids eat way too much beige and we don’t eat anywhere near enough vegetables. I’m genuinely scared for our future health!

Help us……please!

You did well to love it for 18 years!! 💪

Another one who actually quite likes cooking, but the relentless grind of family meals every bloody night is just soul destroying.

We eat a fairly boring rotation of meals that seem to do the job. It doesn’t take up too much brain space for me and the kids eat them without too much complaining. I’ll often give them chicken nuggets or something on a weekend and have something a bit fancier for DH and I. But mostly we all eat the same (or similar)

DH and the kids went away for a week in the summer. I didn’t cook a single meal for myself that was more complicated than pizza. It was bliss!

I don't love to cook but I want my dc to have healthy meals so I do it.
My dh also works long hrs but he'll cook on weekends sometimes.

Some of our meals are -

Various curries I've dahl and rice
Beef and broccoli noodles
Seasoned baked salmon, green beans, peas and boiled seasoned potatoes
Spaghetti bolognese
Macaroni cheese
Pasta with veg
Fajitas
Roast chicken thighs, potatoes and other veg
Homemade burgers
Egg fried rice

Following for the same reason. Tried all sorts of hacks including that Stocked frozen delivery firm - I loved it, DCs hated it 🫠

I like cooking and Mon-Fri DH is away so it falls on me regardless. DH cooks when he's here or we do it together and clear up together. I do have a 16 year old DS who could well cook but for speed I tend to do it and then he clears the kitchen afterwards.

I do a meal plan every week with easy stuff mid week (normally stuff ready in 30 mins or less including prep time) and buy prepped/frozen veg quite a lot. While I do have a few favourites that appear where I don't need a recipe to follow, I prefer to eat different things so have a huge collection of cookbooks as well as a Kindle subscription that gives me three cooking magazines every month.

We are dairy egg and nut free due to allergies and I could never make those boxes work to cover everyone's needs - which recipe selections did you have?

-Could you buy plain pizza bases or use wraps, add tomato paste then the kids add their own toppings to make pizzas?

-This is my favourite, crumbed, fake KFC type chicken coating. It would work on pork chops, schnitzels, fish etc too. I make up 4x the mix and store in an airtight container, to save time when I want to use it. I generlly coat chicken thighs or drumsticks. No flour, no egg. Just coat in this coating, which you can do twice for a crispier coating. I oven bake/air fryer, but you could deep fry if you could be arsed with the mess! (I never am!)
Measurements are approx:

• 1 cup Golden bread crumbs
• 2 Tablespoon paprika
• 1 teaspoon each of Italian herbs, garlic powder (no salt), onion powder (no salt)
• 1/2 teaspoon celery salt and some ground pepper.

-Toasted sandwiches
-Baked potatoes
-Burgers
-Nachos

I'm the only one who does the cooking. I don't mind too much, some days feel more in the mood for it than others, usually related to how much time I have. We also try and limit our UPF but are not perfect and have jarred pesto and mayo, ketchup etc but everything else I try to do from scratch. I alternate between easier quick meals and dishes that take longer. Pasta (tomato, chorizo, tuna, cheese), jacket potatoes with tuna and cheese, salmon and rice, risotto (which I make in my instant pot so much less time and effort), roast chicken and potatoes and roast veg are easier. Lasagna and curries more time consuming so done on weekend.

We have leftovers for lunches and after school snacks - like roast potatoes reheated in the airfryer, wraps with cooked chicken etc.

This week I plan to do: ricotta and spinach (blended in sauce) pasta, puff pastry sausage rolls (I have some all butter puff pastry and some pork mince which I'll mix with sage and chopped onion and fill like sausage rolls, hopefully won't take too long), and maybe a chicken and chorizo traybake with some onions, red peppers and tomatoes.

I really enjoy cooking, but loathe cleaning.

If I hated cooking I'd do the following

: make a bolognaise that could have a run of beans and cumin added the next day to make a chilli.
: grill chicken fillets for two days of salads or a curry.
: make a lot of jacket potatoes
: buy margarita pizza and serve with salads.

Well...until recently most mums cooked for their families every single day - it's just what you do, like showering in the morning.

I don't have a problem with that at all, although tonight we've had a Deliveroo as I was at a housewarming do.

I hate paying for sub-standard restaurant food, so I've learned to cook the meals I love. I'll typically do a big pot that lasts three days: spaghetti bolognaise, lamb dhansak, beef goulash or chilli con carne.

Then a couple of battered or breaded fish meals that are just oven timed with mash and peas. Then the other two days are pasta: Nigella's carbonara, pasta puttanesca, broccoli and anchovy pasta etc.

It's not what I would consider a chore.

Yeah, I'm over it but my children are older and it's really become less of an issue as we all share the cooking. I am still the mug that does all the shopping and that has now become the thing I loathe!

I also hate waste and wasted effort. So, something I worked with my own DC is giving them a choice before I cooked. Option A was the meal I had planned and they had to eat half or Option B was the same thing every single time. They got bored of the Option B and started persevering with attempting Option A most of the time and I stopped binning meals that they refused.

I made a roasted tomato and veg soup which I knew they liked and froze in portions. There was no super appealing alternative. I think kids conflate dislike with not favouring. I'll always pick chips but I will not vomit if I eat a New Potato in the way that I would if made to eat Blue Cheese. My DC will say they don't like New Potatoes when really they just prefer the chips!

To be honest, we mainly used the boxes for DH and I and gave the kids something else !

However, there were a few options that worked for all e.g. Korean chicken with rice, fish risotto, lamb meat balls.
A couple of the ingredients didn't have clear labelling (the stock for example) so we didn't use these, as DS has a few allergies that aren't in the "top 12", such as peas and lentils.

I hate it too, now I batch cook one day of the weekend so I don't have to think in the week,, it works for us and I listen to the kids to homework/podcasts at the same time.
E.g. today I made:
a giant pasta tuna salad for everyone's packed lunches has been revolutionary, lasts 4 of us all week, kids r trained to decant into small tupperware each day plus fruit/veg and accessories eg snack bar. So much faster than sandwiches.

Beef stew in slow cooker, plus prepped roasted veg ready for mon+wed evening meals

Tomato soup for Tues + Thurs evening meals

Friday is always frice with pesto and frozen veg

Sat is always healthy English breakfast as brunch and pasta based meal for tea.

Then I repeat above next Sunday but prep a different soup and slow cooker dish.

How old are your children? If above ten they should be helping out, e.g. mine helped peel veg and chop today,my 5 year old stirred the salad and "helped". My older kids either re-heat the family meals or have to wash up each night.

Well...until recently most mums cooked for their families every single day - it's just what you do, like showering in the morning.

Showering takes considerably less effort and thought than cooking! 😂

Good ideas, thank you!

I always cooked fresh for my kids, partly because I personally won’t eat most reheated food. But I think I was lucky in that they did eat reasonably ok most of the time and they did prefer spicy foods.
However food was never a real deal as all food was served in dishes and the kids could pick and choose after I had put one item of everything on their plates. Everything else was optional.
I had grown up with food being used as a weapon against me, no way was I doing this to my dc.

I genuinely love cooking every day. The bit I don’t like is planning and deciding.

What worked for us was to involve the kids in helping to come up with meals they would eat (DD can be a fussy eater). So then we just ate 5 of those a week and I’d think of 2 new or less usual meals. So I only really needed to think of 2 ideas a week and that make things much easier.

I think this where family circs really come into play.
My DH works shifts and is almost never around at child dinner time. It's tedious, it's me every single day, all the thinking and planning and half the time and of it goes in the bin as it doesn't get eaten. I'm sure it gets easier as the children get older, but I used to love cooking and now I loathe it

No better suggestions than those already mentioned..just wanted to agree. It’s such a relentless chore. And then to top of that there’s Christmas looming..more bloody shopping, peeling, cooking and clearing up 🙁

We use an app called Sidekick which helps you plan for the week, creates a shopping list and provides simple instructions that you can also listen to instead of reading. You can also scale up for the number of people you’re cooking for and filter by ingredients which is handy.

It’s good to know I’m not alone in this! 💐

I'd rather do laundry or load/ unload dishwasher than cook. I think it's just that it comes at the wrong time of day- when I'm naturally at a bit of an energy slump anyway, and also it's not time negotiable- can't just kick the can down the road till you feel more like it. If I lived alone I just wouldn't cook tbh. I'll live on fresh soups and cheese and biscuits.

Most of the recipes that I don't know offhand are on bbc good food website

Don't know if this is helpful but when I was growing up, we had a weekly meal plan. Mondays were spaghetti, Tuesdays were sausages, Wednesdays were steak and kidney pie... You get the idea. My mother implemented it because the mental load of thinking/shopping/preparing for anything new was too much with a high stress job and lots of kids. I thought every family was like that and was amazed as a teenager to find that most people ate different things every night!
It might help to always know what you're going to cook, how to do it and that you have the right ingredients in.

I won't say I loved it but I found what worked. It doesn't matter if it's repetitive if everyone will eat it. I tried not to serve up anything I knew someone disliked.
Developed a list of meals and just rotated them round.
I printed a list of all meals and stuck it to the fridge.
Then a weekly list.
If making anything like Bolognese or stew like cook double and that's one for the freezer.

FWIW fussy eaters got infinitely better from age 10. They also got better when they were "allowed" to eat a special meal with us.

I have to say that when they left home I swore to DH that we'd be living on ready meals forever.
In fact I have rekindled some enjoyment of cooking and prep from scratch about 5 nights out of 7.