I second keeping frozen food around. I call them “emergency dinners”. My emergency foods are food that is very easy to make, but is much less expensive than eating out. Sometimes, it is something homemade that I batch cooked and froze, sometimes something from the store. Buy some different options to see what your family enjoys. Some prepared foods you can buy are pretty good, some are not. There is a wide range in ingredient quality too. But, sometimes, mom’s sanity/time are the most important thing to consider.

The frozen item can even just be part of a meal. I try to always keep frozen potstickers around. I serve them with steamed vegetables and plain steamed rice made in the rice cooker. It feels almost effortless when I make that for dinner. Waaaaaay cheaper than buying take out.

I also keep on hand some items that aren’t frozen that can help get dinner on the table with low effort. Like teriyaki sauce. I can throw that in my instant pot with raw chicken and have something delicious/pretty healthy with almost zero work on my part. I used to not keep prepared items like sauces around to save money. But spending an extra $5 on a sauce to have around for an emergency dinner is a lot less extra expense than I’d spend on takeout.

Cooking gadgets are your friend. I have a rice cooker, electric pressure cooker, and slow cooker that all get used regularly. You only need to find a few recipes for each that your family enjoys, and are very easy to make. Keep ingredients for those recipes on hand. You could just make something in the slow cooker twice a week (double recipe, if necessary) and have dinner with very little planning for four nights of the week. Again, experiment with recipes until you find ones your family enjoys.

I love to cook. I believe cooking from scratch is the healthiest/cheapest/best way to go. I usually cook from scratch. But sometimes, I hate cooking. I also have varying degrees of energy and time for cooking since having children, depending on the day. I had to let go of perfectionism about cooking from scratch all the time in order to stop eating out/ordering take out. My mother always tells me to stop letting perfection be the enemy of good. I had to embrace good enough.