Joy of Cooking?

Blurb of the Day:
If it's not fun, why do it?

I'm really getting majorly lazy in my old age when it comes to cooking. I spend as little time in the kitchen as possible and when I do, my crockpot gets a great workout. Dump it in, turn it on, go about my business - nothing truly innovative or creative going on in there.

There was a time, back when I was young, fresh, and full of pre-set notions of what a wife should be, that I would actually... are you ready for this?... plan a month's worth of meals!! A month!!!

When I married my first husband and relocated from NY to Mississippi, we didn't even have a place to live (a minor detail he was supposed to have arranged before I got there, but that's a story for another time.) We were newly married, in the Air Force, and didn't have a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of... literally. But, we were happy.

As with any military couple, our income was ridiculously low and had to be strictly budgeted. That meant once-a-month grocery shopping. So once a month I would diligently sit down and wrack my brain trying to come up with different, satisfying meals. Not only the meals themselves, but the ingredients needed to make said meals. I had one lowly cookbook as a reference - a "How to Cook for Two" thing - that I regularly scoured, and my sister used to send me her favorite recipes as well. I came up with far too many ways to cook hamburger, hot dogs, eggs, potatoes... cheaply. We even made our own potato chips a couple of times because we didn't have the money to buy any. I was eager to please and all about meeting the afore-mentioned notions, so it was all kind of fun in a "didn't know any better" way.

So fast forward a lifetime to marriage #2, a comfortable lifestyle, a collection of (too many never-tried) recipes, and more cookbooks than the Library of Congress! Now that I have the resources, the time, and the equipment, for the most part, I just can't be bothered. Poor Lew is lucky if he gets a mindless meal of fishsticks and tater tots now. Okay, I exaggerate a little - sometimes I throw in a veggie too - but we're not feasting on pheasant under glass here. :-)

I do manage to keep the freezer stocked with a variety of meals I've pre-prepared and every once and awhile, I get real ambitious and try a new recipe. I cook now because we gotta eat something, not because it's all that much fun. Lew likes to cook too, which is a good thing, because... well, like I said, we gotta eat something.

So, I've gotten lazy about it all, and that's really too bad. The Joy of Cooking? Uhmmmmmm, nah... I don't think so.