Homeschool Family = 3 Ingredient Cooking!

(Here is as "from scratch" as we get.  Pre-made pizza crusts, open 

sauce bag then squirt on crust, add cheese and toppings, bake.)

Have you ever made a meal based not on ingredients, trendy new recipes or international genre, but on the amount of dishes it will dirty?

I had to laugh when a friend posted something similar on Facebook the other day:


"I find myself planning meals based on which pots and pans I don't feel like washing that day. I should really write a cookbook based on this method. The Dish Washing Avoidance Cookbook, or Meals for Those Who Hate to Scrub. Something like that."


I guess I never thought about it before, but this is what I do, too.

When I see Pinterest posts about how to make a month's worth of dinners in a day, I think, "Good for her.  She's so organized - and look at the variety of foods their family will eat!"

Crock pot divas, I salute you!  (This one comes from www.eatingonadime.com)

Here is what my meal planning looks like (prepare to oooh and ahhh):

Breakfast?  Granola bars.  Peel off wrapper, eat granola, throw away wrapper.  A thing of beauty!  Its' simplicity astounds and delights as it produces not one dirty dish to wash. Cereal and milk.  Toast.  Yogurt.  This is extravagance.

Time for lunch!  If I make the kids eat their sandwiches and fruit on paper towels, the cleanup will be so easy!

What's for dinner?  Homemade soup and biscuits?  No - it will dirty the cutting board, a knife, a pot and a lid.  Plus, I'd need to cook and chop meat.  Yeah, that would make yet another dirty pan.  It would be better to use canned soup.  Only one bowl dirtied there.  And I have a roll of Pillsbury biscuits in the fridge.  Unwrap, plop on a pan and bake.  Voila!  Dinner.  Don't forget to use paper plates.


You may be wondering if I was always this lazy in the kitchen.  The answer, of course, is no.  When I was newlywed, I read a marriage advice book that advised me to always have chocolate chip cookie dough ready.  Okay - I did that.  Made up multiple batches and froze the extra dough.  We had hot, fresh chocolate chip cookies anytime we wanted.  I also recall making homemade crescent rolls that were pretty good.  They tasted like homemade pretzels, and we loved them.  Again, I made them in massive quantities and froze the extras for later meals.  It was beautiful.  It was delicious.  I worked a full-time job, and when I came home, I had the evening to fix dinner and do whatever I pleased.

And then we had child #1, child #2, and child #3.   Soon after, we decided that I should be a stay-at-home mom and to homeschool them.  This whittled my experimental, time-consuming cooking projects down to absolute zero.

(We like to cook and bake, but that means I will have 3 helpers for the project who all want a turn, will drop things, spill things, and potentially leave eggshells in what we're making.  Here my kids are licking the bowl after we made a batch of brownies-from-the-box, our specialty.)

Thus the popularity of refrigerator biscuits, paper plates, frozen pizza and chicken nuggets.  If it doesn't have pizza sauce on it, or can't be dipped in ketchup, chances are, my family won't eat it.

So I don't bother with the time and effort of cooking from scratch.  I recall my high school home ec. teacher preaching the dangers of convenience foods.  I'd like to see her now, the convenience police.

"Hey lady - I'm just trying to get through the day."

And so, I encourage all of you parents out there that have given in to convenience foods and paper plates.  You're doing fine.  You can get through this.  And maybe one day we'll be able to resume our cooking adventures.  Right now, let's focus on our marriage and the kids. 

You can throw the ketchup bottle out when the last chick leaves the nest.

...Unless you are married to a Pittsburgher, like my husband, who is a Heinz man to the last.