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 used to use smoked mackerel as a cheap, nutritious and quick option, but it seems so expensive now for decent ones. And cheap ones are just overly oily and a bit too soft. Maybe I should suck it up and get good ones, just occasionally.

It’s a nice idea to add an egg. If I’ve made a stir-fry or roast veg or something and it seems too boring, my rule is ‘put an egg on it’.

I personally love cooking but yes it's a pain in the arse. When my husband is at work all night ill do an easy dinner and no one minds

@LuckySantangelo35 I don't make the full list. I only mix and match 2 proteins, a salad and bread / focaccia. The dips are shop bought.

For example we might have:

Pitta bread
Hummous
Bean salad (a tin of mixed beans, cherry tomatoes, avocado, if you like mozzarella or feta, dressed with oil, salt and balsamic vinegar)
Smoked salmon.

OR:
Poached eggs
Bread
Sardine and fennel salad (with raisins, olive oil, salt, and balsamic, cherry tomatoes if I have any). Sardines are from a tin
Guacamole (again from the shop) or mashed avocado

It takes me no time! 🙂

@MarkWithaC Yes I have the same egg rule 😀
Tell me about it, olive oil and especially extra virgin olive oil is extortionate these days 🙄🙁

Shorter still if you eat shit.

My wife & I had a good division on this subject.
She would plan what meals we would have & do the shopping list.
I would do the shopping and the cooking.
It worked for us, but I fully understand if your the one left to do the bloody lot it is so utterly tedious.
She died 5 years ago and I must admit I don't get the same pleasure from cooking I once had.

@Goodgravythisisfantastic came across this on FB and it's so apt to this thread 😂

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1764990354003041/?mibextid=rS40aB7S9Ucbxw6v

😂 😭

Thanks the recipes here look very cool...I will try some

Did you get an A? Lol

It's one of the main reasons that I pay for DDs to have school dinners, so they get a hot meal at lunchtime and dinner can be simpler during the week.

E.g. yesterday DDs had roast pork for lunch at school so their dinner was hummus on toast, with some cucumber, tomato, apple and blueberries. Took me 5 minutes to make and is pretty healthy.

DH and I then had beans and fried egg on toast later on. It was great!

There does seem to be an obsession with having to make fancy or elaborate dinners every night and when you're both working it's a PITA. When I was growing up, egg and chips was a standard dinner as was tomato soup with some cheese on toast on the side. Nobody went hungry and they're still my comfort food.

All children eat pretty much anything when hungry 😂 Presumably you've never met an autistic child with sensory issues around food.

That’s what I was thinking. I have an autistic child who didn’t eat for 5 weeks in lockdown because we couldn’t get hold of the particular food item that was the only thing he could tolerate at that time.

Sorry, that should have been a reply to @TotoroElla

My DM hated cooking. She had a set number of dishes and we got them in rotation to the point we knew in advance what would be on our plates on any given day.

No problem. It was what we were used to.

I'd happily eat soup, cereal or sandwiches every night for dinner. I hate cooking so much. It's just too much drama for me. This needs this time, that needs seared, mash don't mix, get air in/out etc etc ( luckily for me my dh is the opposite so I won't die of unimaginative substance any time soon.)

You can make a big tub of salad with all your ingredients and just eat some everyday for lunch/dinner. It's handy to already be prepped. Can do the same with fruit for breakfast/pudding.

I’m a bit funny about salads that have gone more than a night in the fridge. Don’t know why, but I just don’t fancy them once they’re not completely fresh. Buying one smallish bag of mixed leaves, which we’d use in one go, suits me better, although I know they’re more expensive. Then again, it probably works out about the same as if I bought cheaper ingredients but ended up throwing salad out because I didn’t fancy it any more.

We loved a « choice dinner »

It was sold to us as a massive treat. In restrospect it was mum needing a break!

@Nospecialcharactersplease

lol eating a healthy diet is no 100% guarantee of living a long and healthy life Hun

See I love to eat nice meals but I loathe cooking. My husband can't cook he's tried but he's shite, so if I want to eat something nice I have to cook it. We get ready meals on Friday and Saturday as a compromise. I spent three years as a home economist too, so I know how to cook injust find it sooooo boring. I did like getting Gousto boxes , they were quite a novelty with the little bags of ingredients and the recipe cards, but my husband is quite a fussy eater and a lot of the recipes are what he terms exotic 😐so we stopped having those, I liked them though they eased the tedium, not sure they would be necessarily kid friendly recipes either though a lot are are spicy.

Course it isn’t a guarantee. Do you understand how statistics work?

I love cooking and a, very good at it. However, I'm fucking bored with thinking about meals when I've come from from work after a 14 hour shift. My partner lives with me, but is a weekend only cook because he got to the fuck it I'm sick of cooking during the week long before me (he wfh but his job is as demanding and he tends to do 12 hours a day).
We're just tired and preparing food is yet another thing we have to think about on top,of saving lives (me), saving the local services so patients can still access them (him) and general hassle for kids (his) and parent (mine).
So we've given up. This week we had...eggs on toast, scrambled eggs on toast, beans on toast, mushrooms on toast and cheese, biscuits and some fruit for dessert every night.
Not even a small salad, let alone massive one.
And wine. Lots of wine. It's been a shitty week.
This weekend we've gone out for brunch yesterday, takeaway pizza last night and today we are grazing on stuff we picked up on the deli counter of the supermarket and will have some sort of ready meal later. And more wine.
Next week? Who knows. We don't 🤣