Cooking, on Occasion

I'm a big fan of baking. Cooking, not so much. It takes a lot of effort to cook, but you only get to enjoy your labor for a meal or two. When you bake, the rewards last longer!

Now that I'm a mom, though, I feel like I should probably cook real food more often. When DF and I first got married, I tried to cook dinner fairly frequently because I thought that's what good wives did. Ha! Over the years, we've started going out to eat more and more. We like exploring new restaurants and eating a variety of flavors. Plus I got super lazy when I was pregnant.

Since the babies were born, I have hardly cooked at all. I mean, literally, I maybe cooked something for dinner like 10 times since June that wasn't a frozen pizza or similarly easy to make. I just haven't had it in me to plan a menu, buy the ingredients, cook, and clean up.

Some readers might be saying, "But Salmonista, why doesn't DF make dinner instead?" He is even less a fan of cooking than I am. He is in charge of going to pick up our take-out orders :)  And he's also a good grocery shopper. He also has been known to load the dishwasher.

One of my New Year's resolutions was "Try to cook something once in a while." Yes, I made it vague on purpose so it would be easy to accomplish! Well, I'm happy to report that I successfully made dinner last night, and I have tonight's dinner cooking in the crock pot now. I also made a weekly meal plan and wrote it on our message board in the kitchen so that I'm not left scratching my head every day saying, "What should we eat tonight?" Seriously, I was feeling like dinner kept sneaking up on me, and I was like, what? didn't we just eat dinner yesterday?

Now that I started a Pinterest recipe board, I'm hoping this will spur me on to action. I can save the recipes we like and put them into a rotation. After all, I don't want my kids to think that dinner always comes in a styrofoam container or a pizza box.

All this being said, in the last few months, I have managed to cook for other people a few times - friends from church who've had medical issues, new babies, etc. There were so many people who were kind enough to bring us meals while I was recuperating that I feel compelled to pay it forward. I certainly appreciated everyone's generosity, so I hope my friends appreciate my attempts as well! (even though I think I did overcook the chicken one time...)