Cooking rut

I'm in a rut. Kind of like writer's block but with cooking. I still love to cook! I get my food magazines each month and I carefully mark down the pages of the things I want to try, and I pin recipes and I occasionally even buy ingredients but then somehow the cilantro/radicchio/pork belly ends up going unused in my fridge, or socked in the freezer for another time. 

Maybe it is because Connor *still* doesn't sleep through the night and I am TIRED. Maybe it is because I don't know why we seem to have a streak of bad luck that keeps landing us in pediatric doctor's offices. Maybe having two kids under the age of three isn't conducive to cooking? Maybe I just need to start cooking dinner before they hit the cranky hours of the day that are hard to manage even with two adults around? I don't know.

I'm still ordering from Blue Apron and Plated, and that I find enjoyable, because the meal planning is eliminated, the trip to the grocery store is gone and I can still have a healthy, if costly, meal. But obviously the creative process isn't present when I do that, I am just following instructions. 

So, when I wrote my grocery list for this week, I bought the ingredients for ONE nice meal. A roasted chicken, pepper and onion salad with a dijon rosemary orange zest vinaigrette, one of my mom's recipes.

Maybe slowly wading back into the kitchen will get me back there, one meal at a time.