COVID Have You Cooking These Days? Here's How to Improve Your Experience.

It was around 3 years ago. I was new to this whole cook most meals at home thing. As such, I spent my "free time" scouring the internet for healthy meal ideas and recipes to cook for my family. I'd find a recipe, then check out the prep time and list of ingredients. I was interested in the prep time, well because as a family of six spending hours cooking dinner every night was not an efficient use of time. Besides, I worked unpredictable hours, and at times would not be home until six to seven in the evening. Feeding kids dinner at 9 o'clock at night is not ideal to say the least; however, I would not be telling the truth if I said that it has never happened before. Nevertheless, I eyed the list of ingredients to determine if I needed to make a quick grocery store run before getting home. Often times, for a new recipe, I would need to stop to pick a few mundane ingredients and usually an obscure ingredient or two. Some of these obscure ingredients were simply just new to me. We were embarking on a new way of eating with fruits, vegetables, and whole grains being the stars of the dishes. With that seafood, poultry, and dairy were often not a part of the dishes that I was making for my family to try. As a side note, we stopped serving red meat prior to this diet change. This new style of cooking, basically, scared my husband out of the kitchen. Prior to our eating transformation, he cooked most of our family's meals. However, with all the recent changes our family was experiencing at the time, learning a new way cooking was a little much him. He is not fond of change, and although, he was supportive of our diet change for our daughter, cooking became overwhelming for him. I understood and took on the role.

With that, there I was in the kitchen, recipe in hand, list of ingredients sprawled across the island, and a can-do attitude. I'd come right in the door and beeline to the kitchen to get dinner going, often times not even taking some time to decompress from the workday. Besides, the prep time on the recipe is only 30 minutes, I can crank this recipe out in no time practically. Two hours later, dinner was done. Hold up, two hours later?!? Yes, two hours! I spent all this time making a meal only to find out, well, it tasted "okay." All this time for a "meh" response!!! Really? Ugh! I was offended like they were my recipes. I was frustrated. I felt like I was wasting my time, and my family was not trying these meals with an open-mind. I get it. This is not our usual. Everyone had their opinions, except the baby, who, at the time, was too young to care. However, I'm sure going through my oldest son's head was "Where are the chicken burritos?". My youngest daughter had to be thinking, "I want Mac and cheese!". My husband was not shy about sharing his opinion either but expressed his gratitude for the attempt. My oldest daughter was usually grateful as well, and for the most part, open to the new meals. Here was I frustrated and defeated until the day it all changed.