Is this split of household tasks fair?

If cooking, cleaning & running a house only takes minutes there would not be such a high demand for quality 'household help'

I think it's more that a lot of people just don't enjoy those things and are happy to outsource them where they can. I would love the money for a personal chef but that doesn't translate to cooking taking hours - it's just I hate cooking, lol.

I also think it's very easy to make one normal task seem like a very big deal by listing out all the separate stages when you're trying to argue your case/

I mean, I feed all four of our animals every morning - if I list it all out:

Come downstairs.
Get the bowls out of the cupboards.
Get the wet food out of the cupboards.
Feed each of the three cats.
Let the dog out.
Let the dog back in.
Give the oldest cat his medication.
Get the cat biscuits out.
Feed each of three cats their biscuits.
Feed the dog his biscuits.
Get the milk out.
Give all the cats some milk.
Let the cats out.
Gather up all the water bowls.
Wash them up.
Re-fill them.
Wash all four food bowls.

It sounds like loads but in reality it takes me less than five minutes.

If you think living in squalor is on par with making a quick meal then that’s up to you.

Although this thread has moved away from the original OP's question it has been interesting to read differing views.

I support families as a housekeeper/cook/cleaner. If cooking, cleaning & running a house only takes minutes there would not be such a high demand for quality 'household help'.

Many families & couples work long hours, have demanding jobs, busy lives & caring responsibilities (children, elderly parents & children with SEN needs).

The most important thing is working together, sharing the load based on other commitments or paying for 'household' help.

I enjoy making people's lives easier, not everyone enjoys cooking, cleaning & chores and if you are going to do it properly (edible, tasty, clean & hygienic) it takes time.

Just my view, not telling anyone what to do.

I’m not saying it takes an hour to do an onion, but it certainly takes more than “seconds.” (Maybe 180 seconds, for a large onion or two normal sized ones, not including the washing and the peeling.) That’s all. It drives me nuts when people say things like that.

“It takes 20 minutes max to Hoover your whole home!” Yeah, if you live in a one bedroom house with no young children or pets and don’t move your furniture around. Do people even think about what they’re saying when they say things like this?

There is obviously a middle ground between those spending an hour on cutting up an onion, and those who don't even season food. Without seeing and tasting anyone's dishes, it's impossible to know which would be nicer so this debate is getting very silly.

A relative makes a particular dish that they will proudly and ostentatiously slave over for half the day... and it's really not great. (DH has been known to quietly claim their cooking is what keeps that bit of the family so slim!). Meanwhile a friend of DS wouldn't even eat Southern Fried chicken because it had pepper, apparently they don't eat "spicy" food at his house. Pepper!? So as far as peoples' claims that their cooking is great... well, I'll take those with a pinch of salt, a healthy shake of pepper, some sliced chillies and an extra 5 minutes in a hot frying pan to crisp it up.

I could say that if you eat anything other than tuna salad from a packet, cheese, and lettuce sandwiches on untoasted pre-sliced bread or cereal with milk for dinner, that you’re spending “huge amounts of time” cooking in comparison and that it’s totally martyrdom to do anything more than that.

Or that you don’t need to fold and hang your laundry at all. Just pull it from the laundry baskets or dryer in the morning when you put on your clothes. You’re making way too much work for yourself. Modern every day laundry doesn’t take that long.

Scrubbing toilets? Who does that? They flush themselves every day. And if you’ve got a little dirt on your floors and crumbs on your kitchen counters, just spend two minutes once a week to do the hovering and wiping. You can probably get the cat litter done in those two minutes too.

And they don’t require different cooking times.

A salmon fillet, mushrooms, tomatoes and red onion all require 20 minutes.

A bone in chicken thigh with potatoes and broccoli will take 40.

But if they take different times, stand up, open the oven door, and add it.

Absolutely ridiculous people trying to make out that everyday modern cooking requires huge amounts of time.

Well if you want to arse about with 100 stages you can’t really complain about the times it takes and it being ‘relentless’.

It’s total martyrdom.

Do you just straight up boil it?

It isn’t the ingredients that are bland, @Poiuytrewqa, it’s what you do with them.

most of those ingredients have different cooking techniques, times and temperatures to reach their optimum tastiness.

For example - Sautéing adds to flavour development, par boiling first would make roasties soft on the inside, crunchy on the outside, searing will enhance overall flavours etc

you detailed 5 ingredients upthread that you ‘bung in the oven’ your words, all together wrapped in tin foil, and yet each of those ingredients required different cooking times.

yes, of course it’s possible to cook like that, simple and quick indeed, and of course we’re all capable of making a tray bake without your expert instructions. Just, none of us want to.

I have a sestema rice cooker for the microwave recommended here.

Equal amounts of washed rice to boiling water.
15 minutes in the microwave.

Absolutely fantastic.
Gave to friends as a dinner party gift.

Without a doubt up there with pressurer cooker, airfryer and slow cooker.

Used constantly for perfect fluffy basmati in 15 minutes for 5 people.

Rice takes 30-40 minutes to cook, unless you’re just microwaving that ready-made rice in plastic bowls (hello microplastics)

I use basmati and it in no way takes 30-40 mins, 15 max

Pot roast is pretty quick prep, but that’s definitely a pressure cooker meal, not made with the oven!

Ropa needs to be heavily seasoned, seared, and then put into the Dutch oven, which gets put on low heat for a long while on the stove to let the fats in the meat dissolve, then shredded. (If you do it right, it falls apart just trying to get it out of the Dutch oven. Same with the pot roast). The DO is a PITA to clean, but it works well.

When I do my pork loin, it gets heavily seasoned, physically tenderized, and basted with a bit of butter, olive oil, and balsamic, then tented with foil and put in the oven, whereupon it will need to be periodically basted and temped to make sure it’s cooked well enough, but not overdone. Always comes out so juicy and tender that DH has a hard time not eating the whole loin in one sitting, which fills me with pride and satisfaction. :)

Seasoning and tenderizing multiple steaks takes five minutes or longer alone, let alone getting a good sear on them (not frying) before finishing them in the oven (more temping to ensure proper food safety without overcooking).

Apple fries are definitely best in the air fryer (which is technically a smaller convection oven, but it has a drip pan and a mesh basket that lets air get to the food better than it would if you did it on a solid pan, lending to crispier foods.) The apples need to be cited, thinly sliced, tossed around in a bowl with honey, spices, safflower oil, and a bit of lemon juice, and then properly spaced out in the basket.

You can sauté chopped onions for 5 minutes, but they take about 15-20 minutes to properly caramelize.

Other posters are mentioning pre-cut, frozen veggies as a shortcut. Which is fine for a lot of dishes, where the veggies come out soft. (In many areas where produce has to travel a long ways from where it’s grown to where it’s sold, frozen veggies often have more nutrients, because they’re preserved shortly after harvesting.) Frozen veggies also let off more water into whatever you’re cooking, so you might consider defrosting and draining them first, if needed.

Rice takes 30-40 minutes to cook, unless you’re just microwaving that ready-made rice in plastic bowls (hello microplastics), and stir fries are better with rice that’s a day old. It’s also better if you slice up your meat thin and velvet (marinate it with egg whites, cornstarch, and/or a tiny bit of baking soda) it for at least half an hour, and if you put eggs in yours, those are best scrambled in their own pan and added to the dish shortly before it’s finished, otherwise the eggs will cling to everything else while cooking and be essentially “lost.” That’s definitely not “minutes” worth of cooking.

If you make like a shitty American version of a taco (with just ground beef, pre-made taco seasoning from a packet, hard taco shells, lettuce, cheese, salsa from a jar, maybe a dollop of sour cream), that might take 15-20 minutes or so, but if you’re making real, Mexican style tacos (soft tortillas, meat like carnitas or birria, fresh salsa and other sauces, fresh veggies, etc.) that takes much longer.

If you plop raw veggies in your frittata, that’s a quick meal, but it might not turn out as well as if you had sautéed the veggies with the seasonings first (heat brings out the flavor of the seasonings, especially if cooked with a fat, and improves the texture of some of the veggies that would take longer than the eggs to cook.)

Again, not saying that cooking dinner takes the same amount of time and effort as every other household chore combined (unless maybe if you live in a very small home?) but that cooking and cleaning up afterwards is a bigger task than you’re making it out to be, if you’re taking care to make things tasty.

I have also mentioned lemon juice and a range of other seasonings.

Most of the things you mention (pot roast, ropa vieja, roasted pork loin, roast vegetables, honey apple fries) are just foods which are very quickly prepped and thrown in the oven. Adding sauerkraut, frying a steak and sautéing onion all take under five minutes. There is nothing time consuming or much different to what I have been saying.

Except the mash. If I have mash I buy it pre-prepared.

Well you mentioned olive oil like three times lol. (Try using an acid, like citrus juice or a little balsamic vinegar instead of some of the oil; it tenderizes the meat and brightens up the flavor, while also helping to keep it moist.)

We might do a pot roast (pressure cooked with stewed potatoes and veggies), a ropa vieja (made in the Dutch oven, veggies cooked in, served over rice) a roasted pork loin (served with sauerkraut, pierogies, sautéed onions, roasted red bell peppers, and honey apple fries) or a good old fashioned steak reverse-seared in the cast iron pan and then brought to temp in the oven (DH usually likes creamy mashed potatoes with those, and roasted bell peppers. I usually make myself grilled asparagus with a little lemon, garlic and Parmesan)

For quicker bites, we might opt for a chili, taco salad or Mediterranean style bowls, sandwiches from leftovers or from a store bought rotisserie chicken, or pasta dishes…I can’t get the veggies the way he likes them in typical tray bake recipes, and he won’t eat dark meat, cheese, or seafood. But he’ll sometimes just have me fix him half a pound of seasoned ground beef for dinner, if he gets home super late from work. (I think I would puke if I ate just that!)

Where have you got ‘from frozen’ from? 😂 From the frozen carrot batons?

Not that there’s anything wrong with freezing food.

Stir fries, tacos and frittatas take a similar amount of time as tray bakes - literally minutes. Frittatas are chopping up veg, cracking eggs and shoving it in the oven. Tacos are chopping up veg, and shoving some meat in the oven. Stir fries are chopping some veg and meat and shoving them in a pan for a few minutes. They are piss easy. They are not anywhere near as time consuming as doing everything else in the house.

If a person wants to do pies from scratch or casseroles, or chain themselves to a hob to endlessly stir a risotto then that’s up to them, but it’s a choice and not one that needs to be made, and it would be daft to make it every day.

Dinners can still be structured around meats, carbs, and veggies without baking/roasting them from frozen every night. People like a variety of cultural dishes and means of cooking. Try stir fries, ravioli, gumbo, fritters, frittata, tacos, risotto, cassoulet, casseroles curry, hot pot, fondue, pies…hell, you might even try grilling something! There’s a whole world of food to explore right from your kitchen, if you’re willing.

Not sure why you’ve made up the extremely overly dramatic ‘drenched’ in olive oil.

I assume you and your husband never have Sunday roasts.

Have a look at some traybake recipes. It might give you inspiration as to quick ways to cook.

Sorry, it does not take a minute to chop up a singular vegetable.

What do you usually eat for your evening meal?

It’s not “a long winded process” to cut an onion but it takes over 6x longer than you’re claiming, and that’s only one step of meal preparation. Most people seem to be wanting more elaborate meals than what you’re content with, as well. If every night I chucked a piece of meat and some veggies on a sheet pan and drenched it in olive oil, and served that to my husband, he’d be asking to go to restaurants or get carry out most nights.

Similarly, if I only spent a short time cleaning our house such that it was barely habitable, or didn’t fold/hang the laundry after washing it, but rather leaving it in baskets to get rifled through and wrinkled…he would be very unhappy with that as well.

Each partner has to do their share at a satisfactory level, and if that means different, well-cooked, high effort meals every night, then yes, that’s very time and effort intensive, and it’s reasonable to want a break from it sometimes (though OP ought to replace it with some of her DH’s chores.)

I would not be happy with that split. Cooking and cleaning the kitchen is daily. The rest is not. If I have to cook everyday I am only cooking for myself.I would split the chores a little more (plus I loathe cooking.)

It’s also a bit weird that you think that all of the wonderful flavours we have in vegetables (the mushrooms, onions, peppers, tomatoes, garlic, leeks, sweetcorn, peas, carrots, swedes, turnip, parsnips, sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, peppers, butternut squash, sweet potato, celeriac, pumpkin, aubergine, courgette, asparagus, shallots), seasoning (paprika, chilli, garlic, onion salt, basil, sage, oregano, honey, lemon, soy, ginger, turmeric etc), and meats (roast chicken, ham, beef, salmon, sardines, mackerel, lemon sole, sausage, kippers) are all ‘bland’.

If you don’t eat meals mainly around meat, vegetables, carbs and seasoning, what do you eat? What are these flavoursome meals that don’t involve them?

It really does not take long to prepare a quick meal, despite the protests that cutting an onion is a longwinded process.

If OP’s DH was insisting on very intrinsic and time intensive meals then she wouldn’t be unreasonable, but to claim that making a meal for two people in some sort of overwhelming mental and physical exercise is just ridiculous. Many of us who live alone manage to both cook meals and clean the house. Cooking a meal can be done very quickly with minimal washing up.

I don’t usually wait a few seconds for a good shot of the onion rocking, then spend another few talking to the camera to describe what I’m doing, with more time demonstrating it in slow motion. I just cut the onion.

End to end! Never through the fat bit. Then lay it flat side down and cut off the bottom, leaving the top which holds the onion together. Then slice it from bottom to top, so the slices are still held together, and then if you want to dice it, then remove the top.

I had no idea anyone would cut an onion any other way.