I'm in a bit of a ranty mood. A ranty mood about food. And now I'm a poet and I didn't even know it. I should really just stop and go to bed but I must vent.
Meal planning is driving me fucking crazy! All I want is for my family to eat healthy food. I'm not getting all crazy with organic. I'm not insisting that everything be made from scratch. I just want the majority of the food we eat to not be sodium-laden crap. I just do not want to eat take-out every night of the week. Part of this desire is The Guilt (you know the working mom guilt, that just plain mom guilt), in my quest to do it all I feel like I have to provide my family with nutritious meals. The other part is a desire to not become a bloated whale.
I have two major forces working against me in my meal planning. First is time. I simply do not have time to cook a whole meal after work. I try to feed Leo by 6:30. When you get home at 6, that doesn't leave a lot of time. Lately, I have been making dinner the night before so I can heat it up and we can eat together. This works but it means that I have to spend another hour after Leo's bedtime cooking and cleaning the kitchen. This cuts into my wine time which is not ok. I only have a couple of go-to meals that I can pull together in 30 minutes. I need more!
The other force is the pickiness. My husband is an insanely picky eater. He will not eat the following: ham, any kind of seafood, sausage (he'll eat it but pout about it), corn, spaghetti noodles, any kind of squash, eggplant, green peppers, whole wheat pasta. There are more but I'm drawing a blank right now. And Leo has decided that he only eats carbs, meat, and cheese.
The other night I made pasta with homemade sauce with carrots, zucchini, and lean ground beef. Neither of them would eat it! They both caught on that I had sneaked veggies into the sauce. So frustrating. Last weekend I think Leo only ate chicken nuggets.
I'm not sure what the point of this post is. I just had to pound out my frustrations somewhere and I chose my laptop.
I highly recommend a crock pot. It has been a healthy (somewhat) eating savior in my house. It takes a little prep time the night before, but that ten minutes is 100% worth it when you come home to a completed meal. I have some recipes I can share if you would like.
ReplyDeleteAlso you can make pasta sauce ahead of time and then freeze it in a cyclone muffin pan for individual go to portions.
Spaghetti noodles? Any particular reason? That's an odd thing to not like.
Love the crockpot suggestion but also a huge fan of grilling! The cooking time and cleanup is so easy and because I make my husband go outside and grill, he takes more pride in the food and eats it! Plus, dudes generally like meat. The following night, whatever was grilled turns into fajitas. ("Don't eat it today, fajita tomorrow!") Most dudes also usually love Mexican food and drizzling stuff with hot sauce.
ReplyDeleteFeeding a toddler....I need a drink of wine just thinking about it.
ReplyDeleteAny real cook will cringe, but ww pita pizza's are a big hit in our house. Seconds to prepare. Even our own picky little preschooler loves them.
I offer no other advice but sympathy and commiseration.
@ Natalie - I would love crock pot reciepes! I have been a little afraid to use it during the week because we are gone for so long during the day. I always irrationally think it is going to explode or something. The spaghetti noodles makes no damn sense. He'll eat angel hair or fettucinne, but no spaghetti.
ReplyDelete@ Julia - I love the grilling idea! We need to do that more.
@ Nat - there needs to be a support group for toddler feeders.