Good morning. Anybody hungry? I’m starving. A consequence of training for long distance races is that your metabolism plays Freaky Friday with that of a 14-year-old boy, and it doesn’t revert back to its 34-year-old mom self until way, way later. Which means I’m stuffing my face with PopTarts and hunting around for those maternity add-a-buttons to expand my jeans.

Not cool, bro.

Anyway, food. It’s a Real Damn Thing. When I started writing this blog, I planned for food to be a pretty big component. It’s so hard to feed yourself and your family, and there are so many conflicting rules and norms and philosophies. I think feeding kids has probably always been hard, and I’m glad I’m not in charge of hunting down the woolly mammoths or anything, but I do think the pressure we put on ourselves as semi-educated members of society has ratcheted up. Time was, if your kid refused anything without ketchup on it, you could just douse everything in ketchup, willy-nilly.

Now, if you do that, you are Satan.

Ted Cruz-level Satan. Because ketchup has sugar and sugar will (may) rot your liver faster than you can say “But I thought we were supposed to be avoiding fat?”

Anyway. I’ve always been a meal-planner and a wanna-be cook. Since my Basic Foods class freshman year of high school through working at increasingly “nice” restaurants, I’ve been intrigued by food. I also like to eat a lot. And I have kids, and I’m vegetarian, so I figure I know a thing or two about dietary restrictions and picky eaters and I have something to share.

Indeed, my meal planning post was one of my most popular ever. College-age boys wanted recipes from me! The struggle is real, and everyone feels it.

Especially, over the past several months, me. For months now, we’ve been eating out or ordering in constantly. I go to make a meal plan and give up in defeat early. And often. There are a bunch of reasons. First, we switched grocery stores. We now belong to the Park Slope Food Coop (they don’t hyphenate, and it drives me batty). That means that, in exchange for working a 3 hour shift each month and a small membership fee, we can buy groceries at significantly lower prices than the neighborhood competitors. And not just any groceries: Good stuff. Organic and minimally-treated produce, high-end meat replacements, obscure spices, lots of yummy prepared foods and freshly-baked breads. Joining the co-op has changed the way we eat – but not necessarily for the better. I find that I reach for a lot more of the prepared meals because they’re there, and they’re things we would actually eat – root vegetable quinoa burgers, for example – instead of, say, lunchables, which we wouldn’t. It’s basically like we belong to Trader Joe’s I guess. When we shop at Trader Joe’s, I feel the same way. I love the food, but it changes the way we eat. When I shop at Safeway, I buy ingredients to make the majority of our meals from scratch. When a reasonably healthy and fairly cost-effective option is open to me, I take it.

But I actually find that limiting, not liberating. I end up racking my brains for which prepared foods my kids would eat (veggie dogs) and I don’t have any inspiration beyond that. That’s on me, I know, but it’s a definite fact.

Next up, Bret’s travel schedule. It sucks. He was gone for 3 out of the last 4 weeks, and when he leaves, it throws things off. When he comes home, it throws things off again. The kids and I had been eating earlier and earlier, to the point that our “natural” dinner time ended up being around 4:30. But add in Bret, who of course doesn’t get back from the office at 4:30, and everything changes.

The third straw is West’s pickiness. He’s not terrible, but he doesn’t have a broad range of tastes, and they aren’t consistent. Anything he doesn’t like, he picks up and lets gently drop to the floor. West is not a dim bulb, and he knows to give me food rather than throw it, but sometimes, he looks me right in the eye and does it anyway, because he feels that passionately about beans.

It is incredibly demoralizing to make a meal for a bunch of people who have no interest in eating it. Anyone who has ever done this knows exactly what makes the impulse to install a ketchup lever in the dining room so tempting. Lou went through a phase of announcing everything she did not like on her plate as soon as she sat down. I nipped that in the bud, because give me an effing break. Seriously. The dual and competing pickinesses really helped shove me off the ledge and into the vat of pizza and burritos.

Oh, and I read an article that says to be more eco-conscious, you should actually shop more, not less: that you are more likely to waste food and have it go bad if you try to shop for too long of time-spans. I really took that heart, and would go to the grocery store every day and wander around aimlessly until inspiration struck.

There’s nothing really wrong with that method, except that if you wait too long and everyone’s turning into brain-eating zombies, you skip the store and head right to the restaurant.

So, that’s where we’ve been. I have nothing against it morally or philosophically, but - and I know I won’t shock anyone here - it’s expensive. Even in a place where groceries are super pricey, eating out adds up. Plus, it’s just true to my nature to eat at home, and things feel off when we tip the balance and eat out beyond a certain amount. I’m not going to give myself a hard time about our long slog making friends with the local wait staffs, but I prefer to make the bulk of my family’s meals. So, we’re easing back into it. I’ve come up with a couple of meal plans these last couple weeks, and I’ve figured out a grocery shopping schedule that works for me.

This week, we’re eating roasted eggplant spears with marinara dipping sauce with Caprese salad, spinach and gruyere quiche, veggie dogs, fajita veggie nachos and leftovers. (Saturday, we head down to Pennsylvania for our twin nieces’ birthday so I only need meals through the week). These are all real staples for us; they don’t require me to look at a recipe or plan much ahead, and I can cook by instinct and familiarity, which I think is right for getting back into the kitchen. We’ll keep relying on old favorites and standbys as we get more comfortable. And I’ll use a couple discount codes to try out a few more meal services like Blue Apron and Munchery. Who knows? Maybe I’ll have some fun (vegan?) meals to share soon.

Have you ever been in a cooking rut? How did you solve it? Ramen? Takeout? Takeout ramen? I’d love to know! How did you get out of it? Or did you not and are you looking for a little inspo? Does your whole family just bathe in a vat of ketchup and call it dinner? This is a safe space: you can share with us!