I Fed The Kids Chicken Nuggets For Lunch

I have been feeling really burnt out with cooking lately.  Hence the lack of "Cooking At Home" blog posts during the past few weeks.

But it's about more than just a frustrations or boredom with cooking.  We went through a stressful year with the pandemic, Noah was unemployed for eight months, we were all adjusting to a new routine when he started his new job, and then navigating changes in Adeline medical treatment which involved having her undergo minor surgery.

I finally hit a wall trying to manage the mental and emotional strain of the past year and I literally could not think of a single thing to cook for dinner.

Doing the laundry, taking care of dirty dishes, and vacuuming the floor were still manageable because they are simple tasks that you do the same way every single time.  

But cooking?  Cooking involves choosing a dish, gathering or buying ingredients, sometimes cooking components ahead of time, or making sure meat is thawed out beforehand, gauging the time it takes to prep and cook everything, and figuring out how long that meal will last so you know when you will have to cook again.  Those are a lot of mental hoops to jump through just to get food on the table.

I pride myself on cooking and baking from scratch as much as possible for several different reasons.  I know I have the skills and time to cook this way and I want to feed my family the healthiest food possible.  Another reason is because we don't know what is causing Adeline's precocious puberty so I am constantly wondering what exactly is in the food we're consuming (and other household products we're constantly using).

But when I finally hit that mental wall, I told Noah I needed to have some pre-made foods around to feed the kids for lunch.  Chicken nuggets, fish sticks, something.  I know they're expensive and not the healthiest thing we could be eating, but sometimes I just need things to be easy.  Noah picked up a bag of chicken nuggets for me from the store and they sat in the freezer for a few weeks before I finally opened the bag and tossed some in the oven for lunch.

Let's take a look at what is on these plates.  Chicken nuggets, fresh fruit and veggies, bean and corn salad, and some hummus.  But look closer.  I cooked those black beans from scratch in the crockpot, they were not canned.  I also cooked the chickpeas myself and turned them into homemade hummus.  So even though I went against what I pride myself on (cooking from scratch) by feeding the kids chicken nuggets, they still had a lot of healthy, homemade, whole foods on their plate.  (To be truthful, they didn't eat much of the bean salad, probably because this was the third day of eating bean salad and they were tired of it.)

As we were eating lunch it dawned on me that Adeline is four years old and I think this is the first time she has eaten chicken nuggets.  

The kids happily munched away on their lunch and life went on.  The world didn't end because I fed the kids pre-made foods.  Though I will tell you, a meal like this is very much the exception in our house.  I will only ever use it as a fallback and not a regular food choice.  But I am trying to figure out ways to make thing easier for myself, especially cooking since it takes up so much time.

Don't forget to give yourself a break sometimes, my friends.  We could all benefit from a chance to relax.