My Meal Preparation Issues

I love food. I love the smell of it in my house. I love the people in draws in. I love, love food. When I do cook, I enjoy it.

So why doesn't food appear on the table every night when it's my night to cook? Hmm??

I've come up with a lot of excuses, some lamer than others:

1. It takes time to prepare food and clean it up.
2. It's hard to cook with a baby.
3. I'm not super good at making a meal with ingredients that are already in my cupboard. I need a recipe.
4. I get bored from cooking the same recipe over and over again.
5. I feel overwhelmed from having too many recipes that I'm not familiar with.
6. My recipes aren't as organized as I'd like them to be.
7. I have a gazillion recipes for the same dishes and I don't know which one's the best. I'm afraid I'm going to waste my time with the bad recipes.
8. I'm tired of meat and poultry dishes but I'm not familiar with enough vegetarian recipes.
9. My husband enjoys cooking much more than I do and it's so easy to let him do it.
10. I don't have a fancy-smanchy kitchen.
11. I feel overwhelmed by meal planning because I have unrealistic expectations for my skill level :

-Plan at least a month's worth of food.

-No repeats.

-Only one pasta, soup/salad, rice, tortilla dish a week.

-Recipes have to share ingredients.

-Plan foods based on sales and season.

12. Until recently, shopping for food has been a bore.

Obviously there are a lot of issues to tackle here. One trap I get into is focusing too much on #11, the meal-planning excuse. I feel that if I just spend enough time planning, all of the other problems will work themselves out. But every month, finding the perfect meal plan allures me … and in the meantime dinner isn't being made. The saying, "Life happens while you're making plans" has come back to my mind over and over again when it comes t this area of my life.

The times I have cooked consistently have been the times when I didn't think too much about it that week. It's been the times when I've decided to plan just two meals at a time. So I'm going to try to work on not feeling the need to have the perfect meal plan under my belt right now.

There are other things I think I can reasonably focus on right now too. I'm going to read two vegetarian books I have and look up one more that a friend recommended.

As with so many other areas of my life, if I just dive in, really dive in and see where it will take me, I'll find myself actually doing what I want to do instead of focusing on reasons why I'm not doing it. I'm going to need some luck!