what's for tea?

What are you having for tea tonight? Do other people find deciding what to feed themselves and other people so excruciating?

I love cooking, baking, pottering about in the kitchen, I love nothing more than having a big group of people round the kitchen table but the day to day decisions about what to eat... meh.

We eat well in this house and good food is important, we don't go out all that much, we don't smoke or drink (not really, although previous Gin posts may present a different picture) but we do like to eat nice food when we are at home. We generally eat the same 7 or 8 things on rotation and IT IS SO BORING. Most of the time it needs to be quick, easy and nutritious because we have been out at work, we are late back, we have to go out again... but even bearing this in mind we are stuck in a culinary rut.

I try and be really organised so that we only need to shop once a week, buying ingredients to make all the meals that we will eat over the next 7 days,  but this doesn't half take the spontaneity out of food.

We are lucky in that Bob is an adventurous sort of a chap and will eat pretty much anything we put in front of him (although, if asked his favourite food is Heinz macaroni cheese, cold), so I don't need to worry about hiding veg in sauces or making something separate for him but still - meh.

This weeks menu of salmon satay wraps, breakfast for dinner (somehow along the way we have acquired a tradition of having a fry up for our anniversary tea), falafal, pasta and sauce, jacket potatoes and salad, really good fish finger sandwiches*, seems ok on the surface, until I stop and think that really we have eaten the same thing on rotation for about three weeks. I'd like to challenge myself to make something different for tea every night for a month but the thought exhausts me, and some nights I'd rather just have cornflakes.

Somehow I think food is easier in the winter - chuck something in the slow cooker, leave it and then its warm and comforting at tea time. Its the slightly frantic half hour in the warmer (ha, for warmer read just not snowing) months when I'm trying to get something on every ones plates when we are all tired and hungry that makes food lose its sparkle.

I have an array of cookbooks and the Internet at my disposal and I can cook. I get how to put ingredients together and have the resources available to me - both in terms of equipment and ingredients but even so - meh.

I'd like to give my food budget to someone else, just for a week and get them to buy the ingredients and decide what we eat - I'd happily cook it, I just don't want to make the decision about what...

Seriously, let me know in the comments what you are having for tea, or even what you wish you were having for tea.

*if i say so myself, our fish finger sandwiches are something of a culinary triumph. Crusty bread, peas, a layer of mash to stop the peas from falling out...