To rarely cook from scratch?

[Timberss]

I have two children. I work full time, so does DH. We don’t earn a lot so can’t afford to hire help, so everything’s on me. DH does lots round the house but works away for weeks at a time.

I drive the kids around to their after school activities, try to keep up with the washing, cleaning etc, but to cook as well as cleaning up on top of all the other jobs that need done, I am finding impossible.

I used to enjoy learning to cook. My parents didn’t cook much other than spaghetti bolognese, but when DC were younger, i would try some different recipes. I’m just too exhausted now and too run ragged!

Can anyone relate, or am I just a bad mum!

For a bit of perspective I think most families eat healthier than they did in the past. There was no talk of 5 fruit and veg a day in the 70’s/80’s! I am similar to you but i try to chop up some fresh veg for us all to eat through the day. I choose quite good quality convenience food like the breaded chicken steaks from M&S, fresh tomato sauce, pasta with a salad. I am ND so get bored very quickly. On a good week i can cook most nights and then it will flip. I don’t feel bad tbh, i get zero support and juggling SEND landscape, work and all the life laundry. As long as you aim for decent quality and include some fruit and veg i think its fine.

If your kids are fed, you’re not a bad mum. You’re doing your best and if that means convenience food, that’s fine.
You’re working, you’re tired, your kids are fed, you’re doing what you can. If that involves beans on toast or freezer teas more often than other people seem to, so what?

I du t like cooking but getting whole foods in my kids means I do.
You can do one tray bakes pretty quickly and of course there’s batch cooking.
You can make a bolognese one night and the next night add some chili and kidney beans and serve with rice and it’s chili!
I fortunate that my kids would eat anything and love vegetables.

Cooking from scratch sounds really fancy but it doesn't have to be @Timberss . If you boil pasta and get some olive oil and parmesan you have cooked from scratch.
When you make an omelette you cook from scratch. Like my mum I have given raw vegetables to my kids; cauliflower, cucumber, cherry tomatoes carrot sticks, red peppar. They prefer raw to cooked which is fine. Peeled at home so cooked from scratch😅

You aren't a bad mum, your children are being fed.

Cooking from scratch isn't as daunting as it seems though. You can use cooking hacks as well or quick meals. As others have said, batch cooking really helps. How old are the children? Can you get them involved in cooking? My grandson spends a lot of time with me and we travel together and he loves cooking. He just does it automatically now and gets his little stool out and just takes over on the hob! I do anything involving a knife. He gets stuff out of the pantry. It's a nice family activity and we freeze leftovers for another day.

I cook everything from scratch and don't eat UPFs. We often don't eat until 7pm by the time we have cooked, but it's ok as it's always weekends and holidays when schedules can be more relaxed.

Noodles and ramen are super quick to make as well so better for weekday meals. Such a quick and easy meal, healthy too. Quesadillas, fajitas, burritos, and such like also really quick and easy.

Same here. Im with you 💯 %

This isn’t true really though is it. I hate the whole ‘fed is best’ argument. Cooking from scratch doesn’t have to be complicated - someone up thread pointed out that baked potato with cheese is technically ‘from scratch’. I honestly think the damage we must do to our health eating convenience food most days will be enormous.

scrambled egg and toast; baked potatoes, cheese & salad; spaghetti with passata and Parmesan; chicken, wraps, veg & spices… There are loads more! It doesn’t have to be all home-baked bread and refined sugar free!

Honestly eating convenience food most nights is just laziness.

When I was a lone parent with a full-time job batch cooking was an absolute life-saver for me. I'd cook up a big batch of chilli, ragu, roast veg pasta sauce, or curry at the weekend, have it for dinner that day and then portion and freeze the rest. The chilli was used for chilli con carne, tacos or burritos during the week. Ragu/pasta sauce for pasta, jacket potatoes and pasta bakes. Curry was, well, curry served with rice. Those were the meals I used when I knew there wouldn't be much time of an evening due to activities etc. As long as I'd got the main bit out of the freezer the in the morning I could get a home-cooked dinner on the table in 20min using one of those.

If I had a bit more time in the week then I'd do something like sausages/salmon/etc with mashed potatoes plus steamed veg but I'd cook and mash the whole bag of potatoes in one go and freeze what I didn't use. You just need a big enough pot - I have a deep and abiding love for my Ikea Hemlagad pot for this kind of thing. Souvlaki benefits from a bit of prep the night before but is quick to cook, as are meatballs and burgers. Stir-fries are quick, too, particularly if you buy pre-prepared veg mixes. And pizzas using plain naans or ciabatta went down very well and don't take too long provided you don't go overboard with the toppings.

And sometimes we'd have hotdogs and oven chips, chicken nuggets, supermarket tortellini, or fish and chips from the local chippy. I did the best I could but sometimes I was just too knackered and/or had too little time to do something elaborate. That's ok. My DCs are now adults and both of them are good cooks so I think I did enough to set them up with an appreciation of good, healthy food.

I’m not sure if this will help but think about cutting down on the number of post school activities to help free you up a bit and then spending some of that time cooking from scratch, once or twice during the week, even ask the kids to help if they can. I did this when our kids were small (cut down on activities) and found it worked for everyone, I had more time and energy and the kids where less tired and settled.

I get it and empathise. Ive had to cook convenience food when in survival mode too. But i found my health going down hill and then my son got very ill so I wanted to have as many nutrients in our food as possible. I stopped as much convenience food as possible and cooked as fresh as possible. As a busy working mom there are some hacks you can use - batch cooking for a few hours on a weekend then freezing saves a lot of time in the week. I always double up when cooking or make a bit batch to last a few days or freeze. There are some simple hacks such as creme fraiche and MS garlic and herb stock pots makes a great sauce for pasta. or creme fraiche and tomao puree (or tomato and herb stock pot) is another quick fresh sauce. Then cook the past and add the veg. Warburtons pitta pockets with a half sliced chicken breast, pineapple slice mayo and garlic and herb sauce is a quick meal with salad or wedges. I never buy chips anymore I buy a bag of spuds - slice them into wedges, oil and add seasoning and 20 mins in the air fryer and they are done. it doesnt take me very long to cook from scratch with the right hacks and with batch cooking. But if you wanted to do it, start by just introducing a few changes and start transitioning from convenience food to fresher.

I used to batch cook dinners at the weekends. So the freezer would be full of quick easy healthy meals for the weekdays. Zero cooking required

I don’t really understand how families where both parents work full time manage at all to be honest. I do cook everything from scratch (including bread, pizzas, wraps, pittas, pesto, soups etc) but I only work 3 days a week and I don’t think it’d be possible without my 2 days to catch up with everything. So hats off to you and you are not a bad mum at all.

At the end of the day our kitchen looks like a bomb’s been dropped in it, I absolutely love cooking but it does create a lot of washing up!

One of my kids has possible ARFID so eats very little of what I cook. It’s a bit soul destroying but I persevere and luckily (randomly!) she loves fish so will often have toast with a tin of mackerel while the rest of us tuck into lasagne or risotto or curry or casserole…

Unfortunately if you only eat processed food, you will encounter health problems. So I’d prioritise cooking healthy food over constantly cleaning or laundry.
some quick examples of meals I’ve had this week:
flatbreads with salad and falafel
baked sweet potato with a quick lentil chilli
stir fry (ready chopped) with tofu and soy sauce
mccain naked fries with peas and veggie sausages

I only buy food that scores well on the Yuka app.

In the past people cooked from scratch when now they will be chauferring their children round to after school activities. It is a simple either or situation.

Yanbu. It is really hard to make everything from scratch, and doing it on your own sometimes due to dh work trips and also working ft. If you're anything like us, the family support just isn't there these days as grandparents all need to work as long as possible. It is also harder if you have any fussy eaters!

Don't beat yourself up. We're all doing the best we can

Cooking from scratch can just be chopping up some veg and make a quick pasta dish though. I think everyone has time for that.

Not to nit-pick, but aside from the wedges, I wouldn't call that cooking from scratch?

What are people envisaging when op says not cooking from scratch? Turkey twizzlers?

How far in the past are you talking? Because I grew up in the 70s and 80s and we had a lot of tinned, frozen and/or processed foods back then. I wasn't chauffeured around anywhere either.

Each to their own and when my kids were little and fussy I did nuggets and fishfingers like most other mums, but now I am obsessed with not eating UPFs. You might shrug now and think you're fine but eventually they will catch up withyou and your health! I've always been a cooker from scratch but the thing that helped me best when my kids were young was a book I was given called 30 minute recipes. Now, unless something is going in the oven for a longer period of time (but then you don't have to be there as it cooks) nothing I make takes longer than 30 minutes. Some meals, fish for example, can be cooked in less than 10 minutes.

You don't see batch cooking as cooking from scratch? Do you make your own creme fraiche and tomato puree?

I've recently discovered the batch lady. Absolute godsend. Also I've decided to shop to spite my mother which means I value convenience. So frozen chopped onions, garlic and chilli, mixed work vegetables when we have a stir fry for example. Yes you can do all these things yourself but why bother?

No need to get defensive - I'm genuinely thinking people may be making assumptions about what not cooking from scratch means as it might not mean the same thing to you as to me. Warburton pita pockets and m&s garlic and herb stock pots wouldn't be "from scratch" to me, but they are to you for example

I don't have kids to work around so not quite the same, but I have found that cooking at the weekend and then just having to reheat during the week is a life saver. And we have one day a week which is a 'lazy dinner'...it might be pizza or the like. Something we can just bung in the oven.

I have found that cooking from basic ingredients does make me feel a lot better in myself, so it is something I prioritise. I even started making my own bread every weekend - freeze it sliced and it does the week. I like a biscuit with my afternoon cup of tea, but I've been baking them myself. It all happens at the weekend though. And once you have the rhythm of it, it doesn't take too long. Bread was the biggest shocker for me. It takes about 10 minutes to mix up, then it gets proofing time which is fine cause you just leave it alone to do its thing, no kneading cause it's gluten free, and an hour in the oven. It basically does itself. I had always assumed it'd be a bugger of a thing to make!

A lot of this comes down to whether you can count kitchen time as enjoyable time. I love getting the radio on and settling in to cook up a load of stuff for the week ahead, but I appreciate that the kitchen isn't everyone's idea of a fun time.
At the end of the day, there are many simple ways to cook quickly and easily during the week.

I'm also saving money cause I have coeliac disease and shop bought bread, biscuits, etc are EXPENSIVE!

No you're not, and thanks for this post as I am similar and it's so good to read someone else saying they don't cook from scratch constantly, as often it feels like everyone on here does!!
It is just so expensive and time consuming though, and i only work part time! Also, i don't like alot of meat/spicy dishes such as curries, chilli etc, my husband has IBS triggered by onions,beans and eggs, and our two daughters are very picky eaters, so it can also feel tricky to find what to do, and like a waste of time if it doesn't get eaten (we have tried alot of home cooked dishes before such as risotto, beef stew, macaroni cheese, fish pie etc but they won't eat any of them)
I think the main thing is your kids are regularly eating foods from across all the main food groups.Yes ideally less processed and more raw foods, but with limited money (which i have too) and fussy eaters, that is easier said than done!

It didn't escape my attention that you've avoided my question - do you make your own creme fraiche and passata?