Wife is just unimaginative with food and prefers to eat crap...at my wits’ end

[Anonymous]

Why don't you guys learn to cook together? Make it a couples activity. It can be fun. Watch Good Eats together. Plan and make joint meals. Try stuff out that you always wanted to try out.

If that doesn't work, go around here. Teach your kids what healthy food and eating is. Encourage them to cook. Engage them in cooking with you.

[Anonymous]

I have not read all the responses but you could cook big batches of things that can be eaten for days- chili, pasta sauce, roast chicken, soups.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I would never call my husband lazy or obese on an anonymous forum. That’s serious contempt. When you give your spouse tasks you have to let go and let them do it their way. Otherwise, you have to be part of the solution and work with them. If it it a too tired to cook, the figure out how to take some of the cooking off her plate. Or get a house cleaner to come and take that off her plate.

He bought a rotisserie chicken. She took the out for McNuggets instead.

Reheated rotisserie chicken tastes gross to me.

[Anonymous]

One of the things we do without kids is leave fruit and vegetables on the table for them to graze on. We always have grapes, or apples, carrot sticks, or sugar snap peas, or similar sitting out for them to eat. They eat a lot of fruits and vegetables that way. We also focus meals on a lean protein and a vegetable. It is an easy way to cook.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why don't you guys learn to cook together? Make it a couples activity. It can be fun. Watch Good Eats together. Plan and make joint meals. Try stuff out that you always wanted to try out.

If that doesn't work, go around here. Teach your kids what healthy food and eating is. Encourage them to cook. Engage them in cooking with you.

I like the learning together idea but for it to work it HAS to be approached as a way for them to do something fun together, not as a way of OP drying to change his wife.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I used to work nights and was home for dinner daily. How are you not home for dinner? Eat dinner at 530

Why won't OP reply to this? Troll

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the veteran recently back from a long deployment aspect of this is being really underweighted. The veterans I know have good reason to need a recuperation period.

Maybe she should have thought about that before having two kids??

Yikes. You need help. Get a shrink ASAP.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If OP were a woman the freezer would be stocked weekly with casseroles for her husband to heat each night. But since he’s a a man he just wants to make demands and not assign work to himself. SMH.

Pretty much.

No. pretty sure no working woman is slaving away making freezer meal casseroles all weekend so stay at home dad doesn't need to cook. You all have lost your mind

Hahaha! You haven’t met many families with a SAHD have you?

First of all, those guys never admit they don’t have a job — they’re always a consultant (who hasn’t consulted in at least 5 years) or a writer (who never gets past the first sentence of the great American novel.) When breadwinner women complain that their husbands aren’t taking good enough care of the kids, the very first thing they’re told is to stop being so controlling. If he wants to feed the kids hot dogs and watch movies, so be it. And most importantly, the women are told if you don’t like how he’s doing something either do it yourself or say thank you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I used to work nights and was home for dinner daily. How are you not home for dinner? Eat dinner at 530

Why won't OP reply to this? Troll

OP here. I wish I was a troll. I have to commute an hour to work so eating dinner at 5.30pm isn't going to work for me. I have tried many of the suggestions here but my wife tends to conveniently forget when I'm the one who does the cooking and still gets takeout or fast food.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the veteran recently back from a long deployment aspect of this is being really underweighted. The veterans I know have good reason to need a recuperation period.

Maybe she should have thought about that before having two kids??

Yikes. You need help. Get a shrink ASAP.

Don’t think so.

If you are a professional in a career that is KNOWN to need significant recuperation time following transition, you ought to have the wherewithal and situational awareness to assess that having kids during said time is a recipe for disaster.

But go ahead and keep playing the victim card, as our society has become so adept at doing.

JFC.

[Anonymous]

Do you not communicate with her at all? You say she conveniently forgets what you’ve made to eat. If so, call her or email or text and mention that dinner is made and you’ll be home by x-time. (This is different than her knowing you’re coming home and have dinner already made and just going out. You said she forgets conveniently. She can’t if you’re texting a few times ahead of time about it.)

Meal plan with her. See what she likes.

- get a crock pot and make it ahead of time
- have easy, ready food for “appetizers” to snack on while waiting for you: carrots and humus, cut up veggies, nuts, cheese, etc.
- grocery shop together
- buy ready made foods that are simple to create into a meal (on days we are rushing from sports, I’ll have frozen chicken breasts from a bag thawed and baked. When I get home, I’ll quickly make a rice packet dish, add the chicken, ginger, peanuts/peanut butter and we have a Thai-like dish in 8 minutes. I also will have that night’s veggie in a small pot ready to add water to and cook the second I get home. Maybe broccoli, asparagus, cauliflower, etc. you could also do those salads in a bag. Point is that you can have the cooking done yourself in 10 min or less from when you enter the door.
- hire someone to make food in the afternoons or weekends
- make food yourself on afternoons and weekends
- get the kids invested in making food - picking recipes, shopping, cooking - and then make a huge deal how we are having Larla’s lasagne that evening. Call larla at 5:30 and remind her to put it in the oven!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the veteran recently back from a long deployment aspect of this is being really underweighted. The veterans I know have good reason to need a recuperation period.

Maybe she should have thought about that before having two kids??

Yikes. You need help. Get a shrink ASAP.

Don’t think so.

If you are a professional in a career that is KNOWN to need significant recuperation time following transition, you ought to have the wherewithal and situational awareness to assess that having kids during said time is a recipe for disaster.

But go ahead and keep playing the victim card, as our society has become so adept at doing.

JFC.

Well, you are definitely a huge nutter - hopefully you are setting aside a big sum for therapy for your kids as they cope with having a mother with sociopathic tendencies/narcissistic personality disorder.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I used to work nights and was home for dinner daily. How are you not home for dinner? Eat dinner at 530

Why won't OP reply to this? Troll

OP here. I wish I was a troll. I have to commute an hour to work so eating dinner at 5.30pm isn't going to work for me. I have tried many of the suggestions here but my wife tends to conveniently forget when I'm the one who does the cooking and still gets takeout or fast food.

Has she always been like this with eating/cooking?

[Anonymous]

+1 to make ahead in crock pot. The kids are too little to help so far (1 & 4) and might also be picky. She might be too tired by dinnertime to coax them into trying new things.

Try to branch out from what she and the kids seem to like. She likes/makes spaghetti and meatballs? Fine--branch out from there--try a pasta bake that can just be reheated. Even if you think it's boring, it's still better than fast food.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Do you not communicate with her at all? You say she conveniently forgets what you’ve made to eat. If so, call her or email or text and mention that dinner is made and you’ll be home by x-time. (This is different than her knowing you’re coming home and have dinner already made and just going out. You said she forgets conveniently. She can’t if you’re texting a few times ahead of time about it.)

Meal plan with her. See what she likes.

- get a crock pot and make it ahead of time
- have easy, ready food for “appetizers” to snack on while waiting for you: carrots and humus, cut up veggies, nuts, cheese, etc.
- grocery shop together
- buy ready made foods that are simple to create into a meal (on days we are rushing from sports, I’ll have frozen chicken breasts from a bag thawed and baked. When I get home, I’ll quickly make a rice packet dish, add the chicken, ginger, peanuts/peanut butter and we have a Thai-like dish in 8 minutes. I also will have that night’s veggie in a small pot ready to add water to and cook the second I get home. Maybe broccoli, asparagus, cauliflower, etc. you could also do those salads in a bag. Point is that you can have the cooking done yourself in 10 min or less from when you enter the door.
- hire someone to make food in the afternoons or weekends
- make food yourself on afternoons and weekends
- get the kids invested in making food - picking recipes, shopping, cooking - and then make a huge deal how we are having Larla’s lasagne that evening. Call larla at 5:30 and remind her to put it in the oven!

All good suggestions but this is a person who prefers not to cook. So having ready made stuff isn’t helpful. She needs to learn or get a divorce.