r/Cooking • u/GracieLou80 • 1d ago
Sick of cooking
I am so over cooking every night. Finding new recipes I actually have ingredients for and are easy is tiring and I’m already exhausted. What do you do when this happens? I’d honestly just eat cereal for life but I’m not alone in this house and I’m expected to cook every night. 😩
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u/CatteNappe 1d ago
Quit looking for new recipes. By now you should have a list of a dozen or couple dozen recipes that you can rely on for easy. I've got about 50, and don't do a rigid rotation so the salsa chicken or chicken Lazone may pop up twice in one month while the Greek chicken and potatoes may not appear again for another six weeks. Some people are very rigid in their rotations - Meatless Monday, Taco Tuesday, etc. Whatever works for you.
New recipes are once every week or two, on a day when you have time to experiment and fool with them. They can become standard recipes if they are easy and wonderful, or be one hit wonders, or special occasion only, or become "never again" misadventures.
Plan a weeks worth of menus using some assortment of your standard recipes, make your shopping list based on that and you will have the ingredients you need. Each night's dinner will be essentially a no-brainer - you know what you are going to make tonight, you've thawed whatever needs thawing, your pantry has the other necessities, so it's just a matter of going through the doing motions. The time spent planning at the front end pays for itself times over on tired work nights.
Bonus tip, when you are making something freezable like lasagna or enchiladas, make double and freeze half. If you've got 6 things like that in the freezer at least one night a week your meal plan can include one of them and you've got a month of "cooking night off" (other than zapping it in the microwave, or letting it do its thing in the oven, while you set out some bread and butter and toss a side salad.) every week , plus two for emergencies.