"I think goldfish crackers might be the staff of life..."

The cooking situation has gotten bad around here.  Like, I hadn't cooked an "actual" meal in a week.  And the week before that was not much better.  And the week before that.  It's not that we eat out every night but with kids coming and going, picky eaters, my laziness, etc the nights I cook a real meal are few and far between.

Now some of you know that I work for Weight Watchers--it's like teaching Relief Society for weight loss--and every week I challenge my members to try one little change for the upcoming week.  I decided it was time for my "one little change" to be cooking for the whole week.  (Except not the weekend because that doesn't count.)  Some of you may recall that at the beginning of the summer I had ambitious plans to get my children to cook as well.  Those plans were ambitious all right because this has not happened so much. Like not at all.  Mostly because I'm not cooking.  (See the pattern?)  I figured I've got to conquer my own deficiencies before I can hard target the kids.

I mentioned in a previous post how much I dislike all aspects of cooking.  But after this week I've narrowed it down a bit.  In the past I've always really hated the planning of the menu.  This is because my kids are so dang picky!  (If you recall, some of them don't eat fruit.)  It would make me crazy to spend all this time looking for recipes that would suit the picky eaters,  spend forever making the meal, have a kid take two bites and then tell me they weren't hungry only to find them consuming a half box of goldfish crackers an hour later.  (We seriously go through a LOAD of goldfish over here.  I think they might be the staff of life for the Morgans.  That and Nesquick.  If all we had was goldfish crackers, milk and Nesquick my kids could survive quite happily for months.) But I digress...What was I talking about?  Right--cooking.   Dave has been trying for years to get me to just cook what I want and disregard if anyone else wants it--because chances are they aren't going to eat it anyway.

So that's what I did last week!  And you know what?  It was liberating!  I decided to cook what I wanted, how I wanted and not worry about who else ate it.  And for once, I enjoyed cooking.  Or at least I enjoyed the sense of accomplishment that came from planning a whole week's worth of meals and cooking them.  Some of the kids ate all of them, some of them ate some of them and some didn't eat at all due to scheduling but that's ok.  So, here's to another week of cooking real meals!  Who knows, maybe the kids will actually eat all of them.  But if not, there's always goldfish crackers.