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 actually really enjoy cooking and try new recipes every week.

However, when my DC are at their Dads - glorious days! I can cook something fancy if I want but I can also have cereal or toast or just a fuck-off big bag of crisps!

Once, my exh took the DC away for a week - I spent about £15 on food that week on a few ready meals, some fancy cereal and really lush bread! I'd save so much money if I didn't have to provide three balanced, healthy meals a day 😁

My people. And yes to beans on toast as a decent meal.
I often fantasise about what I'd eat if I lived alone. It'd be toast, salad, cereal, jacket potato, cheese and crackers, fancy chopped fruit.

I can't remember what me and DH ate before kids, I only remember cooking frozen pizza, I think we were just at the pub a lot 😂

My parents ate very simply (and subsequently healthy AF) growing up as there wasn't much choice. Soups, veg heavy minimal meat, fish and loads of fresh bread!

Cereal 🤤

Yanbu

Cooking once a week is plenty- make enough for two nights

Snacks and quick things the 4 other days and eat out one night.

Fucking thinking about dinners that are yet to exist. Hypothetical future dinners.

It's the stuff of nightmares. 🫣

😂

This is the perfect weekly meal plan

YANBU. It's not even just that it's dull and never ending, it's just such a thankless task. My DC aren't even that fussy, but finding something that everyone enjoys and is also suitabily "healthy" is so hard. It's the constant feeling of failure.

My additional lazy meal tips are

• chicken fillets in a wrap,
• scrambled egg
• fried (micro) rice, with chopped meat, peas, & spring onion, and the katsu curry sauce you make like gravy (little bit ashamed of that one, but they all love it)

My mum did this. I didn't get it when she first said that she was done with it all, but 13 years of parenting in I totally get it. I like food shopping, I like cooking, I hate having the responsibility of choosing what to cook, all the time. Sometimes I'm all over it, then I just lose my mojo.

Funnily enough both my mum and dad have started cooking a little more now, but after a good 20 year hiatus!

Fwiw jacket potatoes etc etc were always considered a dinner dinner. We do have salad etc with them.

We always do a takeaway or fakeaway on a Friday, pizza (normally home made but sometimes not) on Saturday and roast or a BBQ on Sunday. Then probably one pasta night.

I got so bored of spending so much time meal planning before going shopping that I wrote a list of every meal we like on a cupboard door. When I try a new nice recipe I add to it. Now meal planning takes about 20 seconds because I just need to pick from the list. Just wanted to share this in case it saves anybody else precious minutes of life! But I hear you, its boring and definitely nowt wrong with beans on toast!

I had this exact thought earlier today, and was actually planning to post an identical thread! I cant stand spending the best part of another evening thinking about, preparing and clearing up another meal. I'm looking for any short cut ideas - eggs, salads, baked potatoes.....
Will now read the thread!

Makes me sometimes long for daycare days. They fed them all their healthy meals and all I had to do was a bit of supper when they got home which was usually porridge or something simple

My side tip for lazy dinners is to kick start them with a plate of raw veg whcih gets rid of all the guilt! Chop carrots / sugar snap / cucumber / peppers / celery / tomatoes and offer with hummus whilst you get the rest of it sorted.

Generally mine are pretty hungry by that point so will happily munch their way through a really decent portion.

📝

Crunchy snack platter to start. Perfect thank you 🙌🏻

It's so boring. I actually liked cooking pre-child but now it's such a balancing act of what's in the fridge and what's healthy and has veg but isn't too spicy and what will DD eat and what doesn't take me too long to cook and enables me to supervise piano practice and answer work emails while I cook it. Just so, so boring and tiring. DD is reasonably appreciative and not especially fussy, but what she actually loves is pasta with tuna and peas, not my Spanish chicken stew or prawn curry or whatever. But I feel too guilty about half-arsing it to give up.

I have honest to god stood in the supermarket before, staring at the endless aisles of food, and had this single thought tap dance through my empty mind...

"What do I like to eat again?"

🤔

I totally get it. The same thing happens to me sometimes. I hate cooking, thinking, shopping and preparing for food all the bloody time.

I say do it, keep it as simple as you need to, and come back to cooking when you’re refreshed and ready (assuming you’re normally quite interested in cooking,as I am)..

A week or so with ready made and very simple cooked food gives me the rest I need to get my mojo back for the home cooked meals they like.

Yesterday it was scrambled egg on toast and an extra hour in my sewing room. Bliss.

Give up. Give in. Give peas a chance.

Love this thread. I actually do usually like cooking, but the joy is sucked from it when you're having to do it on a budget, when you know DC1 won't eat that part and DC2 won't eat that part, when both DC are crying, fighting and throwing things on the other side of the baby gate whilst you try to concentrate and not burn parts of the meal, when you're trying to cook and DC1 appears behind you every time you turn around with a hot pan in your hands so you're terrified you're going to scald someone (mostly likely myself, let's be honest), when DH comes home from work late AGAIN so his dinner is stone cold by the time he gets in and meanwhile I have to plate everyone's tea up, and then eat mine as fast as humanly possible because I'm on my own with the kids and they've started eating earlier than me and decided theyre both not eating 50 per cent of it before they want something else...and breathe.

The endless feckin' buying food, preparing food, cooking it. I work full time. Single mum. Get in. Knackered. We sit down to eat. My daughter almost without exception suddenly wants to show me and her brother the latest iteration of her gymnastics routine. He decides what he lived last week is suddenly too bland too spicy just urgh. They won't eat simple things like jacket spuds and beans etc. It's finally over. I get cleared up. Then have to start on the bastard pack ups for school. It is absolutely the worst bit of parenting 😫

The joys of tuna pasta should not be underestimated.

This is where I’m at.

DH is obsessed with ‘proper dinners’, especially pork chops, at the moment.

I’m fed up. This week its been stuff on toast and soup. I don’t care.

We went for an Indian last Christmas too. Dd15 commented that it was my most relaxed Christmas ever.

I do love cooking though, however it is just the 2 of us. I keep fucking everything up with birds eye chilli flakes though... Mmm tastes lovely...
Fuck me!

Hey ho.

Also very annoyingly, neither of my kids (well, the other one us 27 and moved out) have ever liked baked beans! My go to favourite - gits!

I get bored with cooking - tonight we had egg mayo with prawns rolled up
in lettuce wraps

I hate having to think about what we are having all the time. I end up having a fairly regular rotation of meals that everyone likes eg fajitas with salad, burgers and salad, lasagne with veg, all day breakfast, roast, omlettes with salad, chicken with wraps etc

i get bored and fed up that the meal
planning and most of the cooking usually falls to me - we also have to try and plan around activities -DH football coaching, gym
for me and the teens

I really wish someone else would do the food shopping/planning and cooking!!!