To give up on dinners entirely?

[Goodgravythisisfantastic]

So bloody sick of thinking about food. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, every day, every week, every month. Who cares?

Tonight we had beans on toast with sausages and fried egg. Son (nearly 3) ecstatically happy. I realised everyone is happier with the simpler meals and I'm happier for cooking them.

I'm ready to give up and cook only beans on toast, baked potatoes, tuna pasta, fish finger sandwiches, toasties with soup, and chicken burgers.

YABU- stop being lazy and cook a decent meal ffs
YANBU- embrace the lazy dinners. Everyone's happier. In fact here are some lazy dinner ideas of my own...

Thanks in advance! 😴🥱🥔🥪🍳🌭🫘

I really don't know what you mean by me being 'chippy' or 'self-centred' and I never claimed anyone did say one portion was bad . My whole original point was that the OP ISN'T talking about a diet stuffed with nothing but UPF. But sure, crack on and deliberately misconstrue things so it fits your argument better (I presume you're deliberately miscontruing anyway, rather than failing to read or comprehend properly).

We are all different. I do all the meals and cooking. I don't mind thinking of our family meals, I don't mind shopping, I'm not super super organised like doing a rigid, weekly meal plan or rotating regulars, but am semi organised. If I asked the DC they'd invariably want sausages or pasta, DH always curry! Providing nutritionally balanced meals from scratch is important to me as DC do so much sport at a high level. I work PT from home so fortunately have time to both plan and cook. If I didn't have this time it would become much more of a chore so I hear it from both sides.

Good school dinners were my saviour for a few years until fairly recently when they became rubbish again. What went wrong with them? The guilt forced me back to filling lunch boxes with as many healthy, tasty things as possible.

I switch on the radio and switch off my brain when it's time to cook dinner. I go to a different headspace, even if it is the presenter asking, 'what you having for tea?'. Now I do the same meals on a three week rota. I used to enjoy food.

And buttery toast, beans and grated cheese is close to perfection.

I hate the planning and cooking everyday too!

I do the list and shopping once a week - usually plan decent proper meals but recently with increasing amounts of kids clubs and work commitments, we’ve started adding in beans, cheese toast/jacket spuds and omelette/hash brown nights, maybe once or twice a week - the kids love it!!

And to be fair I don’t care what anyone’s opinions are on it - it works for us - I have a couple of nights where tea takes me 5 minutes and get to relax 😊

Please tell us how it doesn't have to be a chore. Im genuinely interested. I hate organising the feeding every day - you turn around and it's feeding time again! It's non stop.

I suspect if you don’t work, or only work very part time, and you don’t have children with specific dietary requirements, and you actively enjoy cooking, then you might not see it as a chore. Sadly none of those things apply to me.

Not the person you quoted but I manage:

B: Yogurt & raspberries (1), 1/2 an avocado (2)

L: Tuna salad with red onion (3), salad leaves (4), cucumber (5)

D: Chicken traybake with carrots (6), bell pepper (7), garlic (8), red onion (9), spinach (10), broccoli (11), cherry tomatoes (12). Honestly I just chuck them all together in the oven dish for an hour and eat.

My solution to this is to literally stick to the same meals on the same days week in, week out (other than holidays periods). Three of the days involves meals that I cook a massive pan of every few weeks and freeze so most weeks I just have to cook some rice and take the frozen bit out the freezer. The other days it's healthy but easy to cook stuff or pizza on Friday. Sunday we have roast (use left over chicken in one of the mid-week meals). No thinking involved at all.

It worked especially well when the kids were little. No moaning about what we were going to eat because they knew what meal was cooked on each day. They went through phase when they got older of moaning about having the same things on rotation but I said they were welcome to choose something else, plan it and cook for everyone but needless to say that didn't happen.

Do you have a spare 1.5 hours on the weekend to meal prep? I do a bunch of meal prep then: chopping all vegetables for the week, making healthy stuff to freeze etc. Then just heating them up over the week.

I have ME and am permanently knackered. But nutrition is not something to skip out on. I can feel the effects when I eat beans on toast & quick pasta vs proper full meals with vegetables.

@Karensgoldleggings I'm not disagreeing that eating well is self care. Doesn't mean it's not deeply tedious!

-Take a full shop with you to Center Parcs.

-There’s a supermarket there next to the pool (at the one we go to so I presume all of them!). You are going to be walking past it every day. You’re on holiday, have pizzas, a bbq and picnic/nibbly bits!

-You can order ‘Dine in’ takeaways aswell delivered to your lodge. I dont know many people who go out for more than a couple of meals in there whole time there. We only do a meal on the last night/pancakes.

-If your child is 4, book absolutely ZERO activities. You can easily spend all morning in the playgrounds, walks, bikes, scooters, going for a hot chocolate, back for lunch in the lodge, out to swimming all afternoon till its dark.

I had to comment as seriously dont stress over food or activities at Center Parcs. Never booked more than one or two activities and ours are much older kids (been going since babies). Always love it there.

Exactly. You can acknowledge that eating well is one of the best things you can do for your health, but still find the execution of it fucking dull. Not enjoying it is not a character flaw or a moral failing.

@Ejvd food is our fuel. You need to view it as the thing that gets our bodies going, and stop seeing the convenient food as the best option

Gosh, is there something in the air?! I was only thinking about this the other day, how I am absolutely over the tedium of cooking! I usually enjoy cooking nice, varied meals (1 meat eater, 1 veggie here), but it's so bloody time consuming and frankly, boring day in day out and I've been doing it for decades. Somethings snapped in me and I just can't carry on. Tbh, it's the planning stage that I dislike the most and that coupled with the COL crisis ( trying to cook healthy, interesting, varied meals in an extremely frugal budget), has given me the impetus to change. Like most on here, I've decided that 2 days a week I'm going for the easy option - sausage sandwiches, egg on toast, toastie... I do actually think I'll lose some weight too as there will be less calories in something simple . Thinking about it, growing up, we didn't have full cooked dinners every night, often it was a pot noodle or a mushroom omelette and none of us starved!

My husband said a few months ago only people who watch Coronation Street don't cook every day from scratch. After 48 years I'm done cooking. Why can't we have egg one toast instead of meat and three veg 😭

Tell him he’s wrong, as I’ve never watched an episode of Coronation Street in my life 😉. Assuming he doesn’t cook from scratch every night though, he must be an avid soap fan?

Or is he solely referring to women?

Reminds me of the scene in ‘Mrs Henderson Presents’ where two friends are having supper and one says something to the effect that the good thing about being widowed is that ‘there’s nobody stop you buying things’.

Honestly? I just don't care that much. As long as my family are eating some varied fruit and veg every day, that's just fine by me.

There's a study that recommends 30 plant based foods per week. That includes high grade chocolate, coffee, herbs and spices. I'm already counting up 16 or so different plants and it's only Tuesday. My lunch salad boosted the count massively.
Even if you like meal planning and cooking, like I do, it can get tedious.
So when I slump, I raid the freezer where historical me has put away batches of meals for future lazy me. Slow cookers are also helpful but you've got to be organised which isn't always me!

I've a list of about 50 or so dinners and I do meal plan because we live rurally and can't just wing cooking so far away from the shops. There is only 3 of us and even then there's dinners DS loves but DH hates and so on. So it is a balancing act and I can imagine how hard it is when you don't enjoy cooking and when you've a few fusspots to cater for!

Never watched Coronation Street, hate cooking!

Explain to him families need simple dinners in the week these days as two parents usually WORK in 2024, plus clubs, homework, washing, housework on top.

Big dinners mainly at the weekend here, everyone is very happy and healthy. Simple dinners Mon-Fri (pasta, scrambled eggs, fish fingers etc). Plenty of fruit and veg to go with it.

@Fantapops

whats a proper full meal’?

also beans are a vegetable

We're both retired children in their forties. Ready meals, meal deals are for idle women according to DH. I raised and fed three sons. I'm done with cooking.

His mother of course slaved over a stove every day until widowed and alone. Then it was cheese and grapes/apples for her dinner 😂

No. If I ask him to cook he makes himself a peanut butter sandwich and says if I don’t want one as well I can make myself something. Its appalling.

When I’m ill he thinks he’s doing me a favour by ‘fending for himself’ (more peanut butter sandwiches and frozen pizzas if it goes on for more than a day or so). He’ll bring me toast or a bowl of cereal if I’m too ill to make myself something but I have to ask him to go and get it for me. He would leave me for days without food otherwise.

Surprisingly he’s a good husband apart from his attitude to food. First his mother fed him, then his school/university fed him, now I feed him. He basically thinks its womens work.

I have a spreadsheet that does a randomised meal plan of all the food our family eats and I run it at the begining of the month and that's it.

Basic jacket potatos every Tuesday...Wednesday a batch cook that we eat weds/thu....Friday and Saturday hello fresh. Sunday I cook a roast of Caribbean Sunday dinner that does us for Monday as well.

There's not much thinking about it these days

He sounds like a prince.
As you are done with cooking, is he cooking his own meals from scratch every night now?