Strong Opening: Fancy Dinner? In This Economy?
Let’s just get one blindingly obvious thing out of the way: nobody—and I mean nobody—has ever landed in jail for feeding their kids frozen chicken nuggets for dinner. If you’re out here hand-wringing about whether it’s a crime that you microwaved three kinds of beige food last night, I’m gonna stop you right there. It’s not a crime. It’s not even a misdemeanor. That’s just called Tuesday.
Normalize the Shortcut: Frozen Is a Fucking Category
Frozen food is not a desperate hissy fit. It’s not failure. It’s a whole-ass category of food, right next to “sandwiches” and “whatever is about to go off in the fridge.” You don’t get extra credit for hand-spiralizing zucchini after work when you’ve got a 24-pack bag of pizza rolls with your name on it. Nobody at the Pearly Gates is checking your breading technique.
Snack plates? That’s called being a genius. Some people call it a “charcuterie board” and charge $39 for four pieces of cheese and three grapes. You call it a snack plate and suddenly people clutch their pearls. Screw ‘em. Pickles, crackers, a few sad slices of turkey, and a fistful of pretzels totally count. Throw a fruit on there if you’re feeling fancy. Boom—nutritional balance.
Reframe the Guilt: Bare Minimum = Survival Strategy
You know what’s genuinely exhausting? Acting like you have to audition for Top Chef just to feed yourself and your heathens each night. Who the hell came up with that expectation? Every kid everywhere will survive on dino nuggets, applesauce, and shredded cheese as their sole food groups for a full month and come out of it just fine. Science hasn’t proved it yet, but I’m fucking positive.
Let go of the pressure that you need to perform dinnertime theater. Survival eats are smart eats. The bare minimum is your friend when life is chaos, and let’s be honest, life is mostly chaos. Most of us don’t have an inner Martha Stewart, and if we do she’s probably in witness protection by now. You fend off meltdowns and get calories in stomachs. Gold fucking star. Truly.
Closing: Take a Breath and Pass the Nuggets
If your dinner table looks like a frozen-food graveyard tonight, you nailed it. If you scrounged up cereal and string cheese and called it cuisine, you nailed it. No one’s spirit will shatter because you phoned it in after a long-ass week. Feeding your people doesn’t have to look luxurious to be good enough.
Dinner was always food, not performance art. Eat, don’t apologize. Fuck it and move on.
The Potty Mouth Panda 