Tasting Defeat

I am not sure if you have caught onto this, but on more than one occasion on this blog I have eluded to the fact that I am a terrible cook. I would not say terrible like I used to be (as in I did not cook at all or I burned something during almost every attempt. At one point I went for over a year without a stove or full size oven, yeah I know some of your jaws just hit the floor. ) I mean terrible as in I do not have time, energy, patience, or the knack for making it through any mildly complicated recipes, and by mildly complicated I mean 4 ingredients or more. My problem, from what I have gathered, is really twofold:

   1.     Our kitchen is TINY which leaves little room for prep space, therefore anything that needs to be chopped, diced, or just broken apart requires too much effort.  Not to mention the lack of counter space leaves little room for any cooking aids (like a mixer or crockpot)

    2.     Time is not on my side. Any recipe that requires more than a few things means that most likely I do not already have them in my house, which means I need to make sure they are on my grocery list and that I have funds to splurge on 10 exotic ingredients. So already that’s time to make sure I get them on the grocery list, money to buy the extra items, and then the time it takes me in the grocery store to hunt them all down, not to mention the time it will take to do all of the prep with the time consuming ingredients!

I’m not knocking cooking at all, in fact I wish I had spent more of my mid-twenties perfecting my cooking technique so that maybe I would already have certain spices and odds and ends on hand. I just feel bad I guess because my daughter is getting more and more into eating solid foods and I want to be able to provide a variety of dishes to her and also show support to all of the food bloggers out there! It seems like everyone has an awesome recipe that I would really like to try but for some reason when I go to make it, my body gets caught in quicksand and I can’t make anything different than I already do. I’m like a boomerang, I take flight and it looks like I’m headed for new adventures but then somewhere along the line I end up propelling myself back to my old ways.

I do my best to add variety to our various meals but in all honesty, if I am being COMPLETELY honest, what I normally do is throw whatever seasonings we have in the cupboard onto whatever meat we have and throw it in the oven. Then I steam some veggies and literally that’s it. No mixing, no checking, no cooling and reheating, just heat and eat. That is all I can manage during the week and sometimes even on weekends. In my mind I have sort of tried to mentally prepare myself to do a cooking marathon in which I cook a bunch of food on Sunday for the week so I can make a variety of food. That for me is a huge commitment, one I know I will not be able to make every Sunday. So, I’m turning to you. How do you prep/ prepare your meals?

Is there a website you recommend for VERY easy prep/ quick meals? Any help would be greatly appreciated!