Maybe I am a lone wolf in this, but I absolutely hate cooking. Don’t get me wrong; give me an entire dessert table to plan and make, and I will bake by heart out and decorate until my hands are numb. But give me a week of meals to plan and prepare, and I will dread every minute of it. This isn’t without reason, I guess. I have a few kids with sensory issues and that means that some food textures are too much for them.
Unfortunately for me, they all have different aversions, so meal times are stressful.
My girls are my more adventurous eaters, while my boys have completely opposite sensory needs when it comes to food, so finding something everyone will eat is impossible. Most of the time, we all have the same base meal with slight differences. At times, it feels like I am a short order cook. I know what you are thinking: “If they get hungry enough, they will eat.” I have been told this numerous times. It is completely false. Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder is so much more than being a picky eater. My kids cannot physically handle certain textures, and will become physically sick if forced to try foods. It absolutely stinks, but it isn’t their fault.
Even before we had our picky eaters, I hated cooking.
Cooking is something I never enjoyed doing and I never could make myself enjoy it. It was just something I did out of necessity. Do I cook? Yes, almost nightly. Do I enjoy it? No, absolutely not. I tend to have a hard time deciding what to make for dinner. It’s like being paralyzed by options and decisions. Throw into that the fact that we have several allergies and food aversions to take into account, and it takes some thought to put together meal plans.
So, that’s what I am trying to get back to doing: meal planning. I was meal planning a year or two ago, and it really helped me plan out everything and not repeat meals over and over every week, but I slowly quit doing it. But now, I am coming out of a slump of hating cooking and making the same meals on repeat again. So today I started my meal planning for the next two weeks. This gives me a list of meals to make for dinner every night for two weeks and uses what I know we have in the pantry and freezer. Come time to cook, all I have to do is make the meal — no thought, no worry, no stress. Then in two weeks I will make out the meal plan for the following two weeks. It has helped before so I am hoping it will help again.
What is something you absolutely hate doing but is absolutely necessary in your life?
