me=worst cook alive

I am a terrible cook. I fully admit it. There are so many wonderful blogs and so many wonderful people I know that dedicate their time to their love of cooking. They enjoy it, they savor it, they look at recipes with anticipation and fun. And I am sure their food always comes out enjoyable and delicious. I am the opposite. I DREAD every day deciding what the freak I am going to concoct for dinner. I have a ton of cookbooks, and this is basically what I do on a daily occurance:

1. Open a cookbook (any of my many) and flip to section that sounds most appealing to me (i.e. chicken dishes, etc.)
2. Flip through the pages looking for the recipe that has the least amount of ingredients. I honestly don't even look at the name or at pictures.
3. Once I find one that has minimal ingredients, I look through the ingredients to see if I even have the 5 measly ingredients it requires.
4. Realize I don't have everything I need and debate going to the store with Owen
5. Think about it for at least a half hour.
6. Realize it takes way too much time and effort for me and my pregnant body to deal with toddler Owen at the store. Plus I will just get sidetracked and buy something else or add candy/pop which I don't need in my cart.
7. Mope around deciding what I should do.
8. Look at the clock and realize that I have spent way too long worrying about this and now it is too late to make anything decent.
9. Forget about it.
10. Lee gets home or is close to home so I pull out a frozen meal (you know, the kind that has everything in it, including sauce), or something else of this nature (aka REALLY easy and fast meal) and hurry and make it in 10 minutes flat.
11. Feel hopeless as a wife/mother that can cook nice, home meals for her family.
12. Sigh of relief as this ritual is over until 4:00 pm the next day!

I guess I still just haven't figured out how to buy things like ingredients that I will use or maybe it's just my lack of proper planning. I absolutely hate trying to plan out meals for 2 weeks, I can't THINK of anything to make and I spend over an hour trying to come up with ideas, let alone go through my kitchen looking to see if I have everything I need. I feel like I waste a lot of time with this whole cooking thing. And to top it off, I hate it. Lee is no help as he says he doesn't care what we have and Owen, well he is a toddler and very picky and so it really doesn't matter what I do. I feel like we eat the same meals every week.

Another thing, when I do try to plan something, it doesn' turn out. Why? I don't know. Seriously. No matter how hard I try to follow a recipe. Even the easy ones, the food turns out not good. I tried to make homemade pizza the other night. I spent way more on the ingredients then if I would have just gone to papa murphy's or something but that is a whole other issue. The point is, I followed the directions exactly on how to make the dough, I let it rise, it kneaded it for the 8 minutes it said and I baked it how it said. Yet, when I pulled the pizza out, it was literally hard as a rock. The dough wasn't burned in the slightest but you could hardly even bite it. Then last night I tried to make this stuffed chicken croissant thingy. Yep, tasteless and gross. I threw mine away.
I know Lee tries to be nice and says it tastes good but it is obvious when he only eats one or two bites or just has a little bit then doesn't eat any leftovers. Which I think is another reason I hate cooking, I feel like I don't enjoy it, me and Lee don't like the taste and it ends up going down the garbage. Which means money goes down the garbage.
I feel bad for Lee who comes from a wonderful mother who is queen of cooking. Literally, anything she whips up will be good. Then poor Owen will grow up without a homemaking mommy. I don't make anything from scratch, boxes are the only way to go. They are way less time and preparation and not to mention the mess that is made whenever I do try to make things from scratch. Plus, boxed items always come out tasting decently good whereas the items from scratch taste like rock hard dirt or paste or you get the idea...I think I need to go on that show "America's worst cooks"
I wish I had a personal chef.