Help me, please, as I know this is ridiculous and am in a right pickle about making good food for my family and finding the time to prepare it so we can all eat together! Background: I'm a SAHM and a terrible cook (or rather, I lack confidence). I'm also a serial dieter (pre-kids) so have never really eaten and prepared normal food, as I was always messing about with shakes, lettuce and tuna, fasting days, glutton-filled days etc. I have two lo's under two, and so far I have got away with a very pathetic level of food preparation. I have also been catering to my fussy toddler (probably made fussy by me), which i have vowed to end now, hence my quest to learn how normal mothers cook and feed their family. I want us all to eat the same, normal, food together. Breakfast I can handle; lunch until now is usually catered to what the toddler will eat (boiled pasta and peas with no sauce, bagel with no cheese, cucumber, fruit - basically likes carbs and fruit), dinner for toddler at 5pm is more of the same, then me and DH eat after bedtime but that's usually a prepackaged meat in sauce, boil in the bag veg, anything that takes 20 mins as we're shattered after putting both kids to bed. I desperately want to know how others prepare dinner so it's ready by 5pm, without having to stay in from 3pm till 5pm preparing it, with baby/toddler climbing the walls.
I usually get 1.5 hours from 1pm when they both nap, so I feel I could use this time to chop veg etc but am so overwhelmed I don;t know where to start. Sorry for the essay, thank you for reading!!