[disneysteve]

I think you need to mentally get past, "i DO NOT know how to cook". It doesn't take a PhD to slice up some veggies, saute them in a pan with a little oil and serve them over some rice or pasta. And it certainly doesn't take any advanced training to pop a frozen dinner in the microwave and hit start. If you watch for sales and coupons, even buying ready-made stuff at the supermarket would be an improvement over doing the fast food thing regularly. Around here, frozen dinners are often on sale for $1.99. So for $4.00 you'd have dinner for 2.

I'm curious. Do you watch cooking shows on TV like on PBS or the Food Network? If so, STOP doing it. Those shows are great. We love them and we've gotten some great ideas from them. But if you are starting basically from scratch in the cooking department, those shows can really scare you off and make you think cooking is this terribly complex process. It doesn't need to be.

Check out the library or bookstore for beginner cookbooks. There are some focused on teaching kids to cook and books geared to college students leaving home for the first time. Those would be good places to start.

The time argument is a cop-out in my opinion. If you count the time to drive to the fast food place, order your food and drive home. You could have prepared a cheap, healthy meal instead. Make omelettes. Make quesadillas. Make tacos. Make soup. I could give you at least a dozen recipes that are ready in under 30 minutes (and I'm not half as cute as Racheal Ray). And remember, if you make extra, you can take some for lunch another day.

There are a bunch of websites devoted to once-a-month cooking where people talk about spending one day each month cooking up big batches of stuff that they portion off and freeze to serve throughout the month. That gets past a lot of the time constraints we all face. We do some of that. For example, my wife makes her own spaghetti sauce. It takes about an hour or so but I'll then portion it off in single-use containers and freeze them, so she only has to make sauce every 2 months or so. Or she'll make a lasagna and we'll do the same thing. Or I'll make a pot of soup and do the same thing. Then I'll just grab a container of soup and take it to the office to heat up for lunch with a fresh roll.

It really isn't that difficult once you put your mind to it.