Three Great Reasons to Never Cook Again

Now don't get me wrong, I don't usually mind cooking. I even sometimes enjoy cooking. I'm not, however, all that great at it. (Just ask my ex: he apparently shares my culinary mishaps with our 7 year old. Yee-haw.)  Especially at 6 p.m. on weeknights, when the Boy is whiney-hungry, and I'm work-tired. Even so-called "20-minute or less" meals are too much: for one thing, they ALWAYS take me more than 20 minutes to prep and cook. For another, after I'm done spending 30 minutes (or more) cooking, I get to be the one cleaning up my mess afterward. (Yay! Not.) So I'm still spending at least an hour in the kitchen.

That's time I'd rather spend doing something else — anything else — but one of my many personal hang-ups is the paranoia that if I'm not feeding the Boy homemade, healthy food, I'm being a Bad Mom. (One of the reasons I'm hung up on this is because we have gone through long stretches of drive-through dinners ... which usually coincides with me reading about how terrible fast food meals are for growing boys. My timing needs work. But that's a post for a different day.)

So how do I balance my desire for healthy, homemade dinners with evenings that aren't consumed by the preparation and consumption of consumables? I've come up with a couple:

• Grocery Store Dinners: I don't take advantage of these often enough, but a rotisserie chicken and a store-prepared side meets my home-cooked criteria and is as easy as popping it in the microwave. The hardest part of dinner is getting it on the plate!
• Someone Else Cooks for Me: Now that I have a little more play in my budget, I've started using Evolve Paleo, a local Paleo "catering" business. I'm not a strict adherent to the Paleo diet; they had me at the "we cook it, you pick it up (or hey, we deliver!) and eat it." One or two of those meals per week, and I can fill in around the edges. They're tasty, use real ingredients and, again, meet my "healthy" (if not homemade) criteria. 
• Crock-Pot Cooking: Crock-Pot cooking is still technically cooking, but it's as close to cooking as I usually get these days. Right after my divorce, eating in was a budget requirement, and that's when I learned to love my Crock-Pot. Crock-Pot cooking is really a misnomer: it should be Crock-Pot prepping, because that's basically all you have to do. Oftentimes, that prep work is fairly minimal (a double bonus, as far as I'm concerned!). I can toss a meal in, clean up the kitchen, and still be out the door in time for work. And dinner is ready to put on the table when I get home. My parents even got me this awesome cookbook (Better Homes and Gardens Ultimate Slow Cooker Book), which features a lot of serial recipes: you make this one night, and next night turn it into this (or that, or this over here).

The thing is, these options WORK for me. I can cook when I want to and not cook when I don't. And the Boy always gets a healthy meal put in front of him, which makes a happy mom. That, in turn, makes me not mind the occasional trip through the McDonald's drive-through, which makes for a happy Boy. Wins for all!