Not being able to decide what to have for dinner and getting increasingly hungry and indecisive and hungry and indecisive...

This ever happen any of you? Bad planning is disastrous. I've settled on takeaway but even that has too many choices, variables like healthiness/expense etc just muddy the waters further.

Has this ever happened to me? It's how I live my life almost every day.

this is the worst

worse than actual starvation

i know, so fucking annoying, you know it's the hunger wrecking decision making process. why am I on the internet now?

do I leave the house, get delivered, go buy something simple like a piece of chicken and cook instead...GAH

eat pizza

Would suggest the "if you're hungry go to bed" solution but it's far too early.

you just need to make a decision and stick with it

what is the first food that comes into your head

When all choices are equally attractive or unattractive, you should just make a stab at one. Indecisive people need to be much stabbier, imo.

pizza is roughly always the right decision in cases like this

o you live in like ireland dont you

leave house buy cheap supermarket pizza

actually make that moderately priced pizza, no man should ever have to eat those 99p jobs from costcutter.

I try and avoid cheese as I get migraines...pizza in London not that bad, honest! there is italian pizza...

I got chicken and sweetcorn soup and special fried rice from local chinese.

have a beer, it will take the edge off and make cooking/waiting for food more fun.

I am having fish soup and red salt pollack with a carrot and bacon stew, does this help?

this thread = me in an hour from now

This happens during my bouts of CRIPPLING DEPRESSION. It typically indicates I am HORRIBLY DEPRESSED.

was hoping nobody would guess that part of it. my motivation for living/creativity is so low right now I can't even motivate myself to feel depressed.

I feel ya, buddy!

Unfortunately.

For both of us?

I guess?

I heartily recommend the fish soup, very creamy.

yeah it's a real fucker, long way back to the top of the mountain...(x-post)

recipe?

Has this ever happened to me? It's how I live my life almost every day.

Ditto, kind of -- my problem lately is not indecision so much as flat-out not wanting any of the obvious options, being vaguely repulsed by the thought of any of them, and yet knowing that if I don't eat I'll wind up feeling just as bad. (And lo how I miss the indiscriminate hunger of youth, etc.) I am going to start trying to combat this by keeping frozen vegetables in the house at all times, on the logic that if you can't stand the thought of anything else you should just have a cup of totally neutral broccoli, which will healthfully fill your stomach without making you feel any way in particular, and at least buy you time to think about what else you might want.

when in doubt, make tacos

I think taking something out in the morning is a good plan. And planning carefully what you'll make, buying veg etc on the way home.

It's the slow creep of not caring and then not bothering that piles up all day and makes it impossible.

Milk is kind of like food. You could try drinking some milk?

I think it is some trade secret of this nautical themed pub by the docks in oslo, but I think it goes something along the lines of boil up a bunch of fish, strain, reduce the stock, add carrots, prawns, scallops fish pieces, gently cook and then add cream and warm.

Xpost

I've eaten food now. Soup and rice. It was okay. I feel not hungry, at least.

Give us a hug.

people need to be much stabbier

for some reason this phrase just cracks me up - like as advice you would give to a friend "hmm, I think you need to be a little STABBIER. You know, if you wanna be really fierce."

was hoping nobody would guess that part of it. my motivation for living/creativity is so low right now I can't even motivate myself to feel depressed.

or shave

;-)

frozen veg is a good idea, i should have thought of it a long time ago, instead of buying fresh stuff which i use once and then leave to rot in the fridge.

(hugs nabisco)

thanks big guy.

louis my beard is the one thing I'm proudest of right now.

well, obviously, I can only be proudest of one thing. you get the meaning tho.

we are all proudest for ourselves these days. not for our society. the days when you could be proud of your society, when you would happily air it on the washing-line and even the crows would stay away, those days are as poisoned as the gutters in which society drowns

you sound like louis-ferdinand celine started writing mccain speeches

i'm just a local garda tribute act: Society is in the gutter

not indecision so much as flat-out not wanting any of the obvious options, being vaguely repulsed by the thought of any of them

I'd like to think if I lived in NYC instead of Mayberry, I wouldn't have this problem, but that's probably not the way it works. Part of the problem is that my wife gets absolutely no pleasure out of food*, and dislikes many of the foods I love the most. I feel more isolated at mealtimes than any other time.

---------

*Pleasure no, comfort yes. The distinction might be in interesting thread on its own.

Pizza is always the solution to these frustrating nights, except that five minutes after ordering I start to pace, wondering "where the hell is it??"

Pizza is a great default option. On these nights I am likely to opt for that or, unhealthily, eat a massive dinner that involves munching on various things for a couple of hours trying to find something I actually *want*. But I find when I plan dinners ahead, I end up enjoying them more.

Definitely. Most of my favourite meals come out of my crockpot (whole chickens, pot roast, shredded pork... mmmm). I do the munch on many things for hours (and wind up with a bowl of ramen) thing too.

oh yes. the bowl of ramen is key.

i don't get this so much these days, possibly because i seem to be eating out all the time, but time was when i would leave work every night and go to the supermarket on the way home and just stand there for ages staring at things but not even really seeing them, just feeling empty. oh dear.

another great version of this is not being able to decide what to do with a free day at the weekend so just sitting around the house or going for a really lame walk or something and feeling utterly useless. again i don't do this quite as much these days, thank goodness.

this is why god gave us mac and cheese!

When I feel like this I just have a few glasses of wine and half a pack of smokes, then I'm not hungry any more and I'm tipsy! Problem solved. Hic.

But then again I love cooking, so I dont usually get that indecisive, I just have a time trying to work out what to cook with the things on hand.

I hate it when you're starving and there's no food in the house, and you keep putting off going to the shops until you start hallucinating.

it's a rare day I don't go through this ...

this has been worse than ever for me lately, partly a Summer thing but also too busy to want to cook. had KFC twice in the last 7 days.

had peri peri chicken from a local place just now, was pretty great but not so healthy

GAH

Oh man, already been through this twice today. My mom would be ashamed at how I've dealt with it. Meal 1: beer, peanuts, chips and creamy dip. Meal 2: beer, salmon bagel, bagel crisps, and tiny thing of store-bought potato salad. the pizza here sucks and mexican is not an option and I'm starting to get a little gut from the chinese place down the street. Don't have an oven in the kitchen so those store-bought pizzas aren't an option. I think I'm damned to snack meals for the rest of eternity.

You need a default meal in your life - my mum used to cook spag bog whenever she couldn't decide what to make; me I make pasta with onions, bacon & pesto and whatever's lying around like frozen peas.

i HATE when this happens

my default meal is smoked haddock and sweet potatoes...but i need to be working to be able to buy smoked haddock without a 20 min walk

The answer to a question like this is always Peanut Butter.

this has ruined entire months for me before. nowadays I keep plenty of snacks and cereal handy in case of emergencies.

my biggest problem is that i know just about all of the local restaurants where i live. i know how much they cost, what the food tastes like, how long it would take for them to prepare/deliver the food, etc. i more or less have a default restaurant, though it is kind of pricey and the quality of the food has begun to go down lately.

when this happens, get an onion, a pepper, some tomatoes and a courgette basically whatever veg you have in the bottom of the fridge, then get a small roasting tray and pre-heat the oven to 180. Chop and mix the veg in a bowl with some salt, pepper and a few whole cloves of garlic.

Chuck it in the oven, wait a bit and throw in some red wine/balsamic vinegar/red wine, wait a bit longer till its all.

Serve with pasta.

This happened to me today, and I made orzo in leek and bacon cream sauce.

My go-to off-the-cuff meal generally involves a skillet, some fresh vegies, some olive oil, and some pasta or white basmati rice. From 20 to 30 minutes later, I can eat.

The way we get around this is to have a default meal or meal category for each day. Monday is salad, Tuesday is Indian/Chinese, Wednesday is Italian, Thursday is soup, etc., etc..

Friday some kind of omlette-y/cheese-on-toast/rarebit thing...? :-D

lol yes!

(xxpost) I tend to have the same category of evening meal on the same day every week. So on Monday it's salad, Tuesday it's Indian or Chinese, Wednesday it's pasta, Thursday soup, Friday some kind of omlette-y/cheese-on-toast/rarebit thing. This way I have a fair idea what I'm going to have, but there's a certain latitude there so it doesn't get boring. And if I can't be bothered to decide, there are always a couple of fall back meals that I can do in each category. For example, with pasta on Wednesday, if I can't be bothered to do something complex or new, then I can do pasta with tomato sauce and parmesan.

― snoball, Thursday, 25 September 2008 11:57 (1 year ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Although at the moment (ha! gotcha!) the grill is broken, so it's scrambled eggs on toast as default Friday meal.

Ugh.

the grill is broken,

Grill fixed last month, normal service resumed...

grrr

My mom once told me that what to make for dinner is the hardest decision for her. She thinks about it all day until dinner and she doesn't enjoy thinking about it. I can kind of relate.

And by "I can kind of relate" I mean "I secretly wonder is it's some intergenerational curse placed on my ancestors."

Never happened to me when I was single cos I could cook only when I wanted, only what I wanted, and change my mind at the last min, but it happens all the time now!

This is why I'm loving the slow-cooker the most, because I can do my prep and put things in the cooker and turn it on, and be perfectly, responsibly idle for at least a few hours. It breaks up my time so it doesn't feel like I spend ALL afternoon thinking about/making dinner.

you guys should adopt my system! it has worked wonders and i rarely have this problem anymore. it takes a while here is the process:

* cook things
* take simple photos of things you've cooked (only things you have not photographed before)
* upload your food photos to flickr, in their own designated set

as you accumulate more photos, it becomes like a visual menu and will give you ideas for what you want/what to make.
this is extremely easy if you have an iphone or such, only slightly less easy if you don't
it doesn't represent EVERYTHING i have ever cooked, obvs, just an assortment of new things as i make them
i do take pictures of new varieties of things like tacos, etc.

protip: adjust the set so the photos show up randomly and you don't get sick of looking at them in a particular (or chronological) order

And srsly, I would be like, "I want to make hummus!" whether I had anything to GO with hummus or not, kinda. Also "homemade experiment hummus with celery sticks and crumbled feta and some corn tortillas from the freezer (blackened on a stove burner) if you need a bready platform", may seem like a meal to a few of us, but for most people...no.

there are currently 128 photos in there
link is public atm, you could even use my photos as ideas if you don't want to make your own

i bought a sainsburys "taste the difference" paella. 3 pounds, and actually not too bad.

http://www.whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com

That's so not helpful, because I don't have any of the ingredients for those things yet. I need an app that says, "You have canned tuna, feta cheese, one large radish, and some Romaine lettuce you better use before it gets very very sad from being in the fridge; now here's what we're gonna do." Unfortunately I'm afraid that app is called "a brain" and some days I just don't have one to spare.

my system is v helpful!

I had this earlier but am waiting on some simmering lentils and bacon.

lolol Amanders, I looked at your photos (actually I still have the window open!) and what struck me most was how many VEGETABLES there were in all your stuff!!

that reminds me that i have three new things to add
sometimes it makes me feel like a glutton to have produced and eaten that much food, but hey -- might as well live as well as we can, right.

laurel: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/recipe-search/search

i also don't post recipes because i don't usually use recipes. i try to give myself an idea of how i made it and, if anyone's watching, for someone else to get the basic idea. most of it is not off the wall or hella innovative or time consuming. i just like to cook and if i'm going to spend this much time doing something, i might as well have a record of what i've done. it's part of my "domestic work is work and it matters" campaign.

oh ok here's a link for anyone who cares http://www.flickr.com/photos/marshmallowy/sets/72157622779106086/

fucking hell...

i have grilled chicken thighs with chickpeas everytime this happens now. but have already had them once this week.

grill the chickpeas and make chicken hummus?

liquified chicken "spread"...shudder

sometimes i like to chew up one chicken thigh and use the resulting paste as a "sandwich spread" between two other chicken thighs...

pushing back the frontiers of cuisine

push them back a bit further pls

i had kfc...and watched darkman.

Chicken thighs are my secret weapon.

For cooking, that is.

they are so nice...i remove the bones and griddle them, always amazing.

into a dish with garlic cloves, vine tomatoes and basil leaves until everything melts.