We got an instant pot as well. We make Chili every so often. So good with some tortilla chips to dip.
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Right???
The funny thing is that when the kids had guests, they ate everything I put in front of them.
I even got complimented by the parents: âI know when my kids have eaten at your house AuntBea because our kids load up the dishwasher and wipe the counters/table after theyâve been to your house.â
It was a requirement at our house that whoever ate, had to clean up (regardless of age). Maybe thatâs why our kids stopped eating at the house!!!
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I enjoy cooking and cook 5/6 nights a week - the other nights we do take out. Now we are fully vaccinated we may venture out to a restaurant now and then. I prepare pretty much everything from scratch but what it is varies - Iâll do pasta dishes (including homemade spaghetti and meatballs), grilled meats with veggies & a starch, stir fry, big salads, soups, stews, homemade pizza, ribs, grain bowls. Fortunately, my teenagers arenât too picky although they do have their favorites. My hubby will eat anything but beets. Breakfast and lunch are on your own â I canât spend all day cooking!
My mother was a terrible cook. She overcooked everything. Mostly we ate stews, salads and vegetables, but all were overcooked. My Dad had a huge garden and we did have lots of tomatoes, swisschard, and lettuces. My Mom never baked and believed sugar was evil. She was a big proponent of a guy named Gaylord Houser who was a self-help nutrition guy in the 1950s and 60s. As a result, we never had deserts. My Dad liked ice cream and would buy it and share it with us, which drove my mother crazy.
My cooking style is really different (although I donât bake). I try to use natural ingredients and rarely overcook anything. H and I like to plan what weâre going to have for dinner and usually shop every 2 days. We rarely go to large supermarkets and like small butcher shops, fresh produce stands, fish markets, and/or other specialty markets.
With COVID we didnât shop as often and turned out not to be great long-term planners. We ordered out more often because weâd decide to do X recipe and wouldnât have one or two ingredients. Rather than go to the grocery store, weâd opt to order something.
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When the kids were growing up we did more of a meat, starch, veggie thing. One summer my son came home from college, and he would only eat meat and veggies. So, we all started eating just meat and veggies (my husband and I didnât need the calories of starches). We mostly never went back.
Now we usually have meat or fish and veggie (often either bag salad, frozen veggies or asparagus).
We do eat spaghetti with regular pasta, and have started doing chicken tikka masala (with jar sauce) and that we do over basmati rice.
Usually Pizza night is just pizza - no veggies, unless we have a bag of salad we need to eat.
Burgers are eaten with potato buns, usually served with salad
One night a week we may have omelettes, with fruit or veggies.
We donât have bread very often at home. Very occasionally I will get some sourdough and make garlic bread with cheddar on top - yum.
I would say we had a lot more fried things when I was growing up. We grill through the winter, and I almost never fry things for dinner.
Dinner now looks both the same and different. My mom relied more on the convenience foods of the 1970âs - rice a roni, canned vegetables, canned soup. I make more things from scratch relying on what is in season. We try and have breakfast for dinner once a week. I wrote on the meal kit thread that we get 2-3 meal kit dinners every week but mostly because I donât have to shop. We are adventurous eaters and I love to cook. DH really likes cleaning the kitchen at the end of his work day because he likes restoring order and finds soapy water therapeutic 
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Itâs been at least 25 years when I first ran into the best and simplest system ever to menu planning.
On note cards make a two week menu plan of no repeat meals. Label them week 1 and 2
Label days of week.
Put in your favorite meals. Include all sides.
So âspaghetti, bread, saladâ. âSteak, baked potato, veggie.â âMeat loaf, mashed potato, beansâ âChicken, baked potato, saladâ. âBurgers, friesâ ," Salad night/ rolls", âMexican nightâ , âseafood/salad/pastaâ etc. I just listed eight variations on a theme. All different. Add two days of âeat outâ or âleftoversâ and weâre up to 10 with no repeats.
The beauty is you donât repeat meals that you just had a couple days ago unless itâs leftovers. In fact itâs been two weeks since that last meal (unless you decide otherwise).
Very easy to shop for. It saves brain drain on âwhatâs for dinner?â
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When COVID started, we began ordering meal prep kits delivered to our home. I saved all of the recipes, and even discovered the entire catalog of meal ideas was available online. We longer subscribe, but when planning my grocery list, I just flip through a notebook of these recipes that I put together. I have really branched out!
I saved a brochure from an on-line place that would deliver full meals (like for TG or Christmas). Their menus were awesome so I kept them as reference.
We belong to a CSA, so what we eat revolves around what they gave us. I like to cook, but not necessarily every night. Since the pandemic weâve been doing take out once a week from local restaurants as our way of supporting them. Those meals always last two nights sometimes three. If the weather is half-way decent, dh likes to use his new smoker/grill. He always cooks for at least two nights. Since I believe anything worth cooking is worth eating twice, I rarely have to cook a full meal more than 2 or 3 times a week. My husband is in charge of the salad, lately weâve been eating dandelions from weeding the lawn. (Itâs pesticide free so no worries there.)
Iâm very fond of Ottolenghiâs cookbooks which are mostly (but not all) vegetarian. They tend to be time-consuming. Sometimes I do stir fries, some times I do the meat, veg, starch meal I grew up with, sometimes I do sheet pan meals - all very, very easy. I love Indian food and so a lot of my meals go in that direction. Last weekend I made raviolli which I stuffed with leftover truffle ricotta from a cooking class the week before where theyâd been tortellini. I think Iâve owned the ravioli maker for over thirty years and never used it! It was surprising quick.
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I like that idea but my family teases me about the fact that we never have the same thing twice. I would hate to disappoint them 
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I definitely cook like my parents with the exception of liking my meat very rare. My mom liked it shoe leather well done ; )
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Iâm still getting used to only cooking for 3 people, especially w/ DH doing Noom. DHâs daily diet is different now so if he wants an additional veg, he usually makes it himself. Typically, itâs a main dish w/ a veg, and a carb/starch. If itâs just the 3 of us, we tend to each at the kitchen island. If all of us are at home, we eat in the dining room.
Our meals tend to be fairly simple typical American fare. Iâm ok-ish with a few mexican dishes (carnitas is a specialty) and maybe one or two Greek dishes. Tonight weâre having roasted pork tenderloin w/ mashed potatoes and dill carrots. DH will make green beans for himself⊠though S and I will probably steal a few too.
My mom definitely cooked more than I do but she was cooking for 6 kids! I use alot of the same recipes, just pared down or made them easier. She made her own sauce and pasta, I get store bought⊠that sort of thing! I still bake, but not nearly as much as she did. Again, Iâve raised/am raising only two kids to her 6.
I actually cook three hot meals every day- except twice a month when I cook nothing at all. Generally dinner is meat/carb/veggie. I love soups in the cold months so those times itâs all in one. My daughter hates casseroles, so we mostly avoid those. Dinner is rarely actually on the table though. I eat at the counter alone most of the time, as Iâm packing it up for my daughter (she eats in on the way home from the dance studio), and I pack my husbandâs up for when he gets home⊠which is typically way after I stop eating for the night. We are much more likely to all sit down to breakfast together, and my daughter and I eat breakfast together every day.
Edited to add its very different from growing up. My mom cooked every day for dinner, but from a box, which really isnât my thing. We were also required to eat dinner together, something I hated then (incredibly inconvenient) and have never enforced in my adult life.
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We rely much less on processed and pre-packaged foods than our mothers did (my husband also likes to cook and we usually swap nights). However, I donât feel the need to have all the elements my mom had in a dinner: meat, starch (potato or rice), veg, bread (sliced white bread on a plate with butter on the side), and a âsaladâ (often this was something like canned peaches over cottage cheese). This was the midwest in the 70s.
I make a lot of sheet pan meals on weeknights now, just a protein and a vegetable roasted together with a light sheet of oil (olive/salt and pepper, or pesto, or something like that). I try not to eat potatoes, rice, pasta, bread every day because I would pile on the pounds. The starch we eat is usually some kind of bean. In warm weather we use the grill almost every night.
I like starch! I think I did acquire a few extra pounds from lockdown, but just a few. I wing it almost every night. I hate hate hate meal-planning. Canât stand it. Like it makes my skin crawl. What if Iâm not in the mood for spaghetti or tacos on that night?!
I used to do more of a meat n three occasionally (we are in the South), but my kids went vegetarian so my husband and I did mostly. We will eat some seafood and fish.
Now my kids, especially the oldest, like to make their own food so I usually just end up cooking for me and my husband. He is pretty flexible on foods although he canât eat dairy. We eat a lot of stir fry, curries, pasta, soups in the winter, sometimes I can entice the kids with make your own burrito night. I am super duper burned out of even thinking about food after this year . Last night we got takeout from a local burger/pizza joint.
My mom did do a lot of traditional meals. Sunday dinner was often oven fried chicken with green beans and rice as sides with a salad. Since I donât eat fried chicken any more I donât do that. I do cook plenty of rice, but it usually goes under a stir fry or curry. I will cook a âmeatâ-n-veg with something like Lionâs Mane mushroom âcrabâ cakes and a side of lima beans (my 17 yr old loves lima beans) and maybe some potatoes (my hubby loves potatoes) and maybe some broccoli. So that would be semi-traditional.
Not sure what to make tonight. Ugh.
What I do for meal planning. I make dinner 5 nights/week. Once/week is fast food and once is a sit down dinner. We grocery shop on Sundays. On the way there, I take requests from H. I plan 1-2 meals that are more elaborate (by my standards). 1-2 meals that arenât too much work and 1-2 super easy meals. (pancakes, even a frozen meal once in awhile). I usually try to do the harder ones in the beginning of the week when I have more energy, but it doesnât matter. I can swap them however I want.
I record the meal list in my phoneâs notes app, so if I feel we are in a rut, I just swipe back through and find something I havenât made in awhile.
My mom is the exact same. When dad is cooking steaks or burgers and cuts one open to find the slightest pixel of pink, my mom is like âTHAT IS ABSOLUTELY RAWâ. Just imagine Gordon Ramsey but female. 
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Slightly off topic but I have 2 things to say about Vodka Sauce Spaghetti Sauce:
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Itâs amazing
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Does it actually contain vodka?
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Yes and yes 
!
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