What time do you have dinner?

cbyrd wrote: »

Dinner in my house is at 4.30 when the teenagers get in from school. They're usually hangry so need feeding before speaking.
Small snack before the younger ones head to bed at 7, they have breakfast at 7am and lunch at school at 12.30 they're starving by 4 so I get them all fed at once and I'm not cleaning the kitchen at feet up time.
Saturday and Sunday dinner is at 2 and then a sandwich or toasty at about 6.
With 5 kids the house has to be like clock work or it descends into chaos very quickly.

(i sometimes cheat midweek and cook a huge pot of stew or bolognese that'll do 2 days )

I think you are amazing cbyrd! I can just about manage to get myself out the door

I would like to take the more European approach to it which is that "lunch" would be their main meal of the day and "dinner" would be a light snack of cheese and meat and maybe a bread.

The earlier I eat my main meal - the better I feel. After it. In bed that night. And getting up the next day. Dunno why. Just my metabolism I get.

But work and life get in the way so I am the more light breakfast - light lunch - big dinner type. I do all the cooking as my girlfriends can barely boil an egg, or do an omelette, or oven-pizza without something burning. The food. The utensils. Or usually both.

So the time to eat dinner tends to be based on when I get home from work. But I love cooking - as much as a hobby as a daily task - so it can take some time to prepare as I sometimes go all out.

So depending on work finish time - and the meal in question - dinner in our place can be anything from 5pm to 9pm. And sometimes we would aim to have dinner together as a family. And sometimes a separate dinner for the kids and a meal with just me and the girlfriends after the kids are in bed. So that can affect time too.

Which is all a bit annoying in a way as in every other area of my life I am a perfectionist and anal stickler for routine and time table. And a variable time for main meal can throw that out entirely.

HS3 wrote: »

I try to make something that'll do two nights and leg it home. Re-heating counts as 'cooking' dinner, so I still get out of cleaning up

A way to do that but still get the brownie points for cooking - is make meals where the left overs from it go into the next days meal. So it does not look like you are getting away with reheating - it looks like you are actually cooking - but the effort is more than halved.

Omelettes - soups - stews - and stir fries are good ways to use up left overs. But there also for example tomato based dishes the sauce for which is perfectly good as a pizza sauce the next day and so on.

Thankfully doing all the cooking means I get away with doing any of the cleaning