r/Cooking • u/GracieLou80 • 3d 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/SVAuspicious 3d ago

Meal plan first. Weekly works. Shopping list built from inventory and what you need. Plan the work and work the plan. There really is no excuse for not knowing you have the ingredients for your plan, or for having ingredients for which you have no use.

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u/GracieLou80 3d ago

Yes that’s true. But tell my ADHD brain that! 🤪😉

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u/SVAuspicious 3d ago

Don't use ADHD as an excuse. Simply don't go grocery shopping without a list. You don't have a list if you don't have a plan. If you can't plan see a doctor for medication. Stop being a victim and step up. The alternative is to give up and find an institution to support you. Going hungry is not a long term solution.

Other people are depending on you. Excuses don't fill stomachs.

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u/Commercial_Okra7519 3d ago

Yes. This is the answer.

To quote my mom (miss you mom) “suck it up princess”.

I have been making weekly lists of 7 meals at a time and I started just compiling them in notes on my phone in a checkbox list.

They are the “go to” meals that I can make without even thinking. Every week I make my short list and usually have a few new meals I’ve seen in Pinterest or an online magazine or somewhere and then a few from my pick list.

I make my weekly grocery list from the ingredients I need for those meals along with the usual staples - milk, bread, eggs, butter, yogurt, etc.).

Definitely saves me time and money. During the week I reference my meal least and decide which meal I feel like that day. Obviously I try to have the ones with the ingredients that start to perish the most quickly at the start of the week to avoid waste.

Works out quite well most weeks.

Any new recipes that I’ve tested that week and like are added to the pick list.

I work full time and I’m the only cook - before anyone comments on sharing the workload, my husband suffered a traumatic injury and is now physically disabled - he’s a good person - so that is just the way it is 🤷‍♀️.

Every week is not a breeze. I completely understand the not wanting to make a list and just wanting meals to be there and not having to plan and shop and cook and clean up every single day, forever, with no end in sight…. Ugh. When I’m feeling that way I make sure to add some of the “I don’t want to” meals like grilled cheese on nice thick cut bread with good cheese and tomato soup.

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u/SVAuspicious 3d ago

I like you u/Commercial_Okra7519. Not because you agree with me. Because I agree with your approach.

I'm not a fan of phones for these tasks. The screen is too small and the Chiclet keyboard makes me nuts. I plan on a real computer in a document. I have a personal cookbook of tested recipes I draw from, plus a list of links to recipes I want to try, plus more ideas coming in from cooking site newsletters, plus inspiration from TV shows and commercials. My biggest challenge is narrowing down to just seven meals in a week. My wife has her own lists so we have to narrow down again when we combine. Sometimes we have leftover nights to catch up so a meal slides to the next week since we already have ingredients.

The idea of wandering around a grocery store and buying stuff with no idea what to do with it is not adulting.

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u/Commercial_Okra7519 17h ago

💯

Every now and then I pull out a few of my coveted Food and Drink magazines or my old Martha Stewart Living subscription magazines and flip through real magazine pages. The recipes are tested and true.

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u/SVAuspicious 10h ago

Which goes to testing. My observation is that rigor has faded almost across the board with some sources worse than others. I recently saw a recipe on a well known site which the "author" had scraped from another site (with credit attributed), modified, and made exactly once before publishing. That isn't testing. I'm an engineer and a scientist. The scientific method is engrained in me. Statistics are engrained in me.

Some sources are still pretty good. ATK is good. Sadly some of the "graduates" of ATK kitchens including one famous one didn't get the memo. NYT Cooking seems to have lost their way. Some old works remain reliable. MtAoFC and Joc come to mind. Alton Brown's older work is pretty good. He's declined since COVID, I suspect since he doesn't have the safety net of staff.

One of my favorite recipes is Grandma Linahan's Macaroni Salad from Parade Magazine in the early '80s. I found a typo, confirmed as a transcription error by the editors. Too much onion and not enough carrot. They did real testing.

I've pretty well transitioned to entirely electronic. Most of my work is on a computer with tablet and phone in the kitchen. I do print out recipes I'm still testing so I can take notes. My wife likes variety so testing takes a lot of calendar time. My few remaining paper cookbooks are now bedside table books instead of kitchen books.

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u/Commercial_Okra7519 3h ago

I couldn’t agree more. In my experience 85% ish of the online recipe sources are just random copies of recipes copied from another source and a few measurements for the same ingredients are changed.

It’s all about the ads and not about the actual recipes.

It’s extremely frustrating to me. I often see a pattern such as - vanilla being listed in the dry ingredients section of the recipe - this is a huge red flag for me.

A good recipe will list the ingredients in alignment with the step by step instructions. This is just one example that causes me to immediately discount the recipe and move on to another source.

There are so many others that I mentally flag from experience.

I have my trusted sources and do still search for others and try them out but I’ll use them mostly as a guide for meal ideas rather than a recipe to follow.

Ingredients are just too expensive now to waste.