Thank you for all of the good suggestions, either in the comments or by email. I looked into menu-mailer services again, but didn’t want to commit, so instead I bought a cookbook from the 6 O’Clock Scramble. It has 52 weeks of menus, organized by season, and hurrah, a companion website where I can download the week’s grocery list. Apparently the big weakness of the Scramble is that it doesn’t have crockpot recipes, so to bump my order closer to free shipping, I also ordered the Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker cookbook.

When I browsed the grocery lists at thescramble, the meals sounded really good, healthy, tasty, and offered a lot of variety. And, if I decide not to make one of the five meals that is aligned with the grocery list, the grocery list is coded so that I can easily remove all of those ingredients before shopping. This appeals to me. It’s worth a shot for 12 bucks.

I am overwhelmed by cooking. There. I said it. The whole concept of cooking a meal every.single.night makes me want to crawl into bed and go to sleep for four days and wake up with a pizza on my front step.

As Ingrid steamrolls towards eating Real Food and not just jarred food and cheerios, it’s becoming more and more important that I figure this shit out. Breastfeeding for me has been remarkably easy. Yeah, that first day with the flat nipples was kind of a pain, but since then? If she’s hungry, I feed her. I’ve not had supply issues, or nipple confusion, or … anything. I can’t eat broccoli, since it bugs Ingrid’s belly, but that’s it. Hungry, feed her, the end.

When it comes to us, though, I’ve struggled with this for years. Not helping is a husband who doesn’t like veggies and was raised on noodles and prefers to eat at 9pm. Also not helping is my paranoia about things being ripe enough, or expired, or anything related to food-borne illnesses like salmonella, e. coli, etc. The two have combined to make my kitchen a pretty overwhelming place.

I can bake! I love to bake! But cookies and hand-kneaded bread do not a dinner make. It’s cooking that has my stymied. Right now, we have our staple meals, with very little variety. I’ve been shooting for a different meat each night, with a pasta night, so here are our regular meals:

• Fish + Veg + Rolls  (The fish is one of the seasoned varieties of salmon that Hannaford sells, the veg is a steam-in-bag kind, and the rolls are the fridge biscuits you cook two at a time)
• Stuffed Chicken Breast + Potatoes  (Chicken by Barber Foods, potatoes are seasoned instant packages)
• Pork tenderloin + veg + rolls (Pork tenderloin is again, some pre-marinated variety from Hannaford, veg+ rolls, see above)
• Beef is trickier, because we eat it the least often, but we might make tacos, or a crock pot meal, or in the summer, grill burgers.
• Ravioli + Sauce (Spinach Ravioli with a sauce with spinach, and sometimes with frozen meatballs added)
• Nuggets & Fries  (Chicken Nuggets & plain potato wedges)

I also like to use the crock-pot, but get kind of grossed out when whatever we’ve cooked ends up just looking like… dog food.  I also have hated cleaning the damn thing, but the discovery of crockpot liners takes care of that issue. 

So, um, yeah. There’s my big dirty secret, I can’t cook and rely very heavily on prepared and processed foods to get us through the week.  Im sure half of it is not planning in advance, since dinner decisions are made at, oh, around 7pm every night, and even if you have regular ol’ chicken breasts in the freezer, 7pm is not the time to figure out what to DO with said chicken breasts, right? I also don’t really like cooking on the stove, I’ve found, because of the smells. Dave made burgers on the stove tonight, which we’ve done probably 3 times since we’ve lived here, and while it was neat to eat a burger, it stiiiinks. And he didn’t use the splatter guard, so it’s a mess.

He cooked though, so I won’t complain, since he’s even worse than me when it comes to cooking, in that he follows the directions on a box of Kraft dinner, to the T, including how many cups of water to start with. (Then he changes it when it comes to the end, adding no milk, and just a pat of butter, making it the driest KD ever. UGH.)  The prepared foods are easy to cook, too — they are all oven things, with directions that are clear, like "put in oven at xdegrees for yminutes, and yay, dinner!" — but I feel like we’ve been coasting on this way of life for too long, and I want it to change by Ingrid’s birthday.

Dave is in full agreement that we should have family dinners, at the table (yeah, not much table eating AT ALL here, yet) despite his penchant for late dinners. Even if it’s just to sit down with us and save his plate for later, if he has to, he is all about that being a standard expectation in Ingrid’s life.  I have cookbooks — many! — from "How to Cook Everything" to the standard Betty Crocker and Better Homes & Gardens ones. When it comes to making a meal from a recipe, I’ve occasionally picked a recipe and gone with it, but then I have all the leftover excess ingredients, that end up getting tossed because I don’t know what to do next, so I make something from the standard list above. I also, though, don’t want to spend all of my time between work & Ingrid’s bedtime… cooking. Sigh.

So, there’s my secret shame. I’m sure we could eat cheaper and healthier if I just knew…. how. And where to start. Maybe someone can help me?

Ugh. Total disappointment at the mexican restaurant. The food was good, but the bill? Pissed us off. Here are some warnings before heading out to The Mex in Ellsworth.

• No chips and salsa while waiting to order or eat. Isn’t that the first rule of mexican restaurants?
• No free refills for soft drinks, and no mention that you’ll be charged $1.75 for every 10oz tumbler filled with ice and drizzled with soft drink. Seriously, maybe the equivalent of half a can of soda in each ‘large’ (oh, and we didn’t specify a size, because, hello, when’s the last time YOU paid for a refill of a fountain beverage?_
• Burritos don’t come with sour cream.
• When you ASK for sour cream, guess what? It’s MAGICAL FUCKING SOUR CREAM, because the scoop I got cost $1.50, as opposed to the name brand stuff I can get at Shaw’s that costs less than a buck a pint.
• I expected to be charged for the guac, and I did get a lot, but that was another $2.75.
• We ended up paying more for fountain beverages and condiments than we did for our individual meals, and the meals were ~10 bucks.
• Also? NEVER EVER told that any of it would be an additional charge. Ever. Which is just bad form, IMO, since they operate on such a different pricing structure than any other restaurant in eastern Maine, I think.

So, next time we just go to Pepino’s. Or Margarita’s. Or fucking TACO BELL. Yes, they have some good veggie stuffings, but seriously. I’m surprised there wasn’t a charge for rental of utensils and the booth. Fuck.

On an entirely different, and tasty, subject, props to jstrizzy for the Pumpkin Oatmeal Chip Cookie recipe. They are DEEELicious.