Me On Cooking

My last post talked about our crazy busy days which led me to thinking about cooking for my family.  Now, I am not one of those people who hates cooking.  I won't say I love it but I do enjoy it.  However, I don't cook a lot.  Chris does most of the cooking in our household, which is actually quite backwards.  But he does it because he is the one that is home.  Because of my hours and commute, it is almost 6:30 each night when I get home from work.  If we waited till I got home to start dinner, we would either eat junk or not eat until it is time for Chris to walk out the door for work.  There are nights that happens but we try to keep that down to a minimum for the sake of both our waistlines and our pocketbooks.   Instead, I text Chris on my way out of the office and he starts dinner so that it will be close to completion when I get home. If there is still stuff to do when I get home, I will help out.  Otherwise, I save most of my cooking for the weekends.

For this reason, I tend to pick out simple, quick meals for us to have during the week.  While Chris was on nights, the crock pot was our friend since he could set it before going to sleep for the day and dinner would be mostly ready by the time he got home from picking Sean up.  The day shift really cut into our crock pot opportunities as I left too early and arrived home too late for most of the meals to work.  I am excited about being able to use it more now that Chris is back on nights.  But for the most recent past, we have been struggling to find decent meals that can be completed in 30 minutes or less. (Don't get me started on Rachel Ray either.) That is why I will look at recipes and decide it is too complicated just based on the number of ingredients.  Five ingredients or less and we are good to go.  Between five and ten and that will be a weekend meal. More than ten, probably not going to happen except for a special occasion and I have to be feeling ambitious.

Call me lazy if you want but that is what works for me.  I have been having a blast on Pinterest pinning recipes that look fantastic but then I will actually look at the recipe and determine it is something that I will most likely never make because it has too many ingredients or too many steps and I would much rather spend my time doing something other than standing in the kitchen trying to complete this meal.  I will say that I have found quite a few recipes on Pinterest that fit my criteria that I am looking forward to trying.  I think I just need to split up my boards a little better so that I don't keep scrolling through the same recipes trying to find one that will work.