Do you actually enjoy cooking every night, or is it just me who’s completely over it?

[Alyah]

I feel like I used to enjoy cooking, but lately it’s become such a chore. Between work, kids, and everything else, by the time I get to the kitchen I just want something quick and easy. But then I end up feeling guilty for not making “proper” meals.
Everyone on social media seems to be whipping up homemade dinners from scratch every night — meanwhile, I’m here trying to convince myself that oven chips and fish fingers count as balanced.
Does anyone still genuinely enjoy cooking daily, or have most people just accepted it’s about getting everyone fed and moving on?

Every weekend, before we do a food shop for the week, we have a family discussion and we meal plan for the week taking into account the calendar and commitments. Boring: absolutely. But this ensures that there is accountability by all involved (including our 6 and 4 year old).We decide who is cooking what which night etc but obviously if someone has a particularly shite day and doesn’t want to do it, then we have appropriate quick and easy back ups. We both dislike this 20 minute discussion and planning time but force ourselves to do it as the week is made far easier as a result. I understand though OP it is absolutely a pain.

For those who hate thinking of what to eat - I get an oddbox + some meat we all like. Then I chuck it all into ChatGPT and tell it to give me a meal plan for x people for 6 days using these ingredients. Voila. You can even just tell it things you all like and ask it for 6 new recipes to try

Cooking yes, picking what to cook I am completely over!

I do the usual thing of making weekly:

Big pot of homemade soup
Around 8 hard boiled eggs
Grate a block of cheese
Make some sort of muffins/cake loaf

This seems to make the other stuff more palatable i.e. we had a bowl of homemade soup with store bought pulled pork, made into sandwiches.

Grated cheese is the used in omelettes, sandwiches, pasta etc etc.

I think this is a big part of it. Now so much of my planning involves what I can cook multiple portions of without bankrupting us.

Thanks for the ideas @sashh . They’re good alternatives to stew I agree. I have done all of those apart from the suet pudding because one of the people I cook for has pancreas issues and can’t eat too much fat. I love suet puddings though, maybe I’ll make one just for me.

I am actually a really good cook, like @CharSiu I can cook most things well and without weighing or measuring, I can eat a meal in a restaurant and replicate it at home just by taste (apart from Indian curries, I never get the same depth of flavour although they’re still nice, just not spectacular), I instinctively know what I need to add to improve a dish, I’d be excellent on ready steady cook because I can make a nice meal out of the most random collection of ingredients. I’ve just stopped enjoying it.

After nearly 25 years of not cooking (although I could), I have cooked from scratch every day for nearly 10 years. The 25 years were those when my lovely late DH cooked every evening. He loved it, a relaxation from his work. To me it was a chore, but still one I did in the time before I met him.

We both had demanding jobs, and as a teacher, mine entailed OOH work.

What marked out the cooking was no consultation on the level of different meals for different members of the family, not as a principle: eat what I cook, but this is not a cafe. No battle, it just wasn't a thing. These were worked out over time and no tussle.

What I've now done for years is to read recipes as I think my DH did, imagining the flavours and whether it would work, rather than the mechanical do-I-have-it -in-my-pantry mode which I had back then.

I cook for myself now, and still from scratch, as always,

You might be surprised.

My brother was the fussiest eater as a child. I can remember my mum making him a ham sandwich while the rest of us had a Sunday roast. Who can't find anything on a roast to eat.

But when we started to go to France on holidays he would randomly pick something from the menu, not knowing what it was and eat it.

Off topic but we found similar. All inclusive worked for DS so much better than we expected. The salad bar gave lots of reassurance and consistency without restricting the rest of the family.

Since I stopped working in London, I get home at 5.30 so I'm completely chilled about cooking every night.

I have a repertoire of about 30 dishes that take 15 mins of effort or less so it's easy. DS happily eats all of them. Whenever I have any time off I try to add another recipe.

I work full time in a demanding job and just couldn't keep up with cooking every night, so I roped my dd11 and ds15 to do a night each, and Saturdays is now 'sort yourself out' day. I let the kids know in advance what to make. They have been great about it and it's lovely to come home to dinner being on the go.

I enjoy 'proper' cooking - I don't enjoy doing boring basic stuff like sausage and mash where I basically have no input and it can still go wrong.

I'm very lucky though, my DH stepped up to do most of the cooking when he retired before me, so now I do the things I want to do, the 'proper' cooking, and he does the boring stuff. I usually batch cook too so there will be one meal for now, and 2 or 3 for the freezer.

I quite enjoy it. We tend to cook from scratch every night but my husband does about three of the meals each week. I plan and shop. We are quick at them though, and have easy ones in there such as dahl, pasta sauce, slow cooker recipes etc.

I used to love it but since children came along I hate it, it’s more the mental load of deciding what to have. We use Gousto boxes as that takes the planning/shopping out of it for most of the week but I’m getting bored with that now.

My youngest is a fussy eater and I have to make her separate meals or put thought into how I can adapt other meals for her so we can eat together at weekends, it’s soul destroying

Oh I’m bored with it all …I cook and I clean up , absolutely sick to death of it .
If I say too much about my circumstances then it’d be outing 😂
Lately I have made a veggie cottage pie ( they won’t eat red meat ) and a Japanese curry with rice , also omelettes.
I am older now so anything too complicated that requires me to be on my feet for ages ( and then I’ve got the clear up to do )I won’t do it anymore

I wish I was like you. I'd rather clean all day .....if someone else would cook :)

I now meal plan.... loosely, but it makes a big difference. I force my family to say meals they'd like that week adding my own choices along the way. I don't fix the day but just the number of meals I want and then shop for those. I bung in stuff for lunches, etc, add the things we run out of to the app as I go along and have found life a lot less stressful that way. They sometimes grumble that we're out of food at the end of the week, but far less waste and it's not my problem if they don't have the imagination to figure out breakfast/lunch from what's in stock. (My kids are uni age I should add... I've made myself sound a bit neglectful, but they are in my granny's words "big enough and ugly enough to look after themselves.")

After forty years of it, yes, fed up. I would rather garden.

Yup pretty much over it but it’s still in my life unfortunately.

I gave myself a year off cooking after ds went to uni, and it was awesome. Though unfortunately I’d already acquired dp by that time so I did cook sometimes. I’d say I now do 60%-70% of the cooking but only for the two of us, and he’s pescatarian so I don’t have to wrangle meat and it suits me pretty well. The fact that dp likes beany curries and Ottolenghi the way I do makes life a lot better. If I never have to cook mince again it will be too soon.

I also love leftovers. I never see why they aren’t loved by all. Ds not too bad at them but what he wants is so unpredictable that I no longer cook for him at all.

I just make easy quick stuff. No need to make life harder

I have one DC with intolerances, so we cook a meal from scratch nearly every night. DH does 3x and I do 4x per week. I tend to make “wet” (not sure how else to phrase this) meals, and I’ll make enough for two meals & freeze half, eg, curries, Thai curries, bolognese, ragu, etc. I only double the “wet” bit, and on the night when we have the leftover portion, I’ll heat up the leftovers in a saucepan whilst I dice some potatoes to throw in the air fryer or boil some rice or pasta, plus steam some veg.

Or I might make a cottage pie, but make 4 in total.

We usually have two of my leftover mains per week, which means that I’m actually only cooking two full meals from scratch per week, which is much more doable for me. I keep a list on the fridge of which meals I have in the freezer and rotate different ones out each week.

DH likes to cook things like steaks with homemade air fryer chips, tenderstem broccoli, and a sauce made from cream on his nights.

I hate it - from menu planning, to shopping, to unpacking the shopping, to cooking. I'm completely over it. We've discovered the Food Warehouse and I have to admit that we use things like their salmon risotto often.

I hate the ‘what’s for tea?’ Question like I’m the tea fairy…. And there is only the 2 of us now.

DH was fairly useless at cooking when I met him…(despite him being the dad of 3 kids and being married for 15 years) … he’s now a dab hand at Sunday dinner, stir fries, cooking dinner.

but he still isn’t great at answering when I ask, what’s for tea?

I enjoy cooking, and trying out all kinds of new recipes, when I am not in work. When I last had a few days off work, I made all kinds of tasty and interesting things! Now that I'm back in work (and I forgot to put the slow cooker on), it's back to oven food that can be cooked in the time that it takes me to shower and change...