To be sick of DH inability to cook

[Friarclose]

DH have been together 9 years. He cannot cook. He is the sort of person who will heat up some fish fingers and chips and tell everyone he cooked. I do 90% of the dinners here and his dinners are always just beige stuff with chips.

I am by no means Nigella but I'm an OK cook, have a small repertoire of dishes, mainly bog standard stuff the dc will always eat - spaghetti bol, roasts, shepherd's pie, sweet and sour, soups, that kind of thing. I've taught myself to do this over the years as in my twenties cooking was dumping a bit of salad cream over the top of pasta!

Tonight I asked DH if he could do dinner. Tortellini and jar sauce. Really can't get easier, 2 mins in the water. He's just served up what looks like soggy paper, all filling fallen out, mushy and horrible, inedible. Oh i got distracted when it was boiling"

I am so. Sick. Of. This.

He's 40, not a student. I have lost my shit slightly, now he's walking around like a sad child. AIBU to stop cooking for him?! He has no problem eating and enjoying everything I make but has zero interest in learning even basic cooking skills and I have really had it.

God, how pathetic! How do you manage to pretend you still fancy him OP when he doesn't even have skills that most 10 year olds have mastered?

I think you are totally justified in being upset with your dh op. It’s not just about being cross “over a bit of pasta”. You were tired and hungry and he was incompetent and couldn’t be bothered! And I hate waste!

Not many day to day practical things in life are very hard. But you have to have a willingness to learn, to practice, and above all, take responsibility and make a bloody effort!

Sorry but if your dh can’t heat up a jar of sauce or cooked filled pasta according to instructions on the back of the pkt then he is absolutely taking the Michael and it it is a deliberate strategy on his part.

I couldn’t cook when I was first married. I wasn’t even much interested in food. But dh was so I had to learn. In a country where I couldn’t speak the language. There’s no excuse.

Seriously, it’s never been easier to learn with You tube tutorials, endless recipes and blogs on line, and fully illustrated step by step children’s cookery books!

Get guosto boxes. Makes a huge difference. He can just follow the steps.

This would be a deal breaker early on for me as I love to cook. Food, cooking, making really complicated recipes, meals out, travel based on local cuisine and delicacies, sampling oysters, wine tasting etc is a huge part of my life so I wouldn't have hit it off with someone who wasn't in to the same things as me I guess.
I can see how it's happened if you're not fussed either and just end up being default cook because you're better at it.
Agree with pp who said 5 meals over 5 weeks, he just has to learn them.
Something we did over covid was every Saturday night we picked a country and a great dish from there and cooked it together. Was really fun to do together. We also looked up a playlist from that country to have on in the background, wine or cocktail from there etc.

If you can read/follow basic instructions then you can cook, to a degree. It’s just fear/laziness.

How much does he pick up elsewhere? My DH doesn't cook, but he does all the cleaning up after, and does other stuff around the house like all the laundry. I'm happy with this as I don't mind cooking, but hate washing! Although we have said I'm going to help him learn some dishes this year as I don't want our sons to think it's usual for men not to cook.

Agree.

Would something like Gousto help?

I would be a bit more pragmatic. Is he deliberately fucking it up? If not it's probably just a learned helplessness. Having a go at him is going to make him less inclined to do it as he'll just feel shit about it. Get a gousto box and ask him to give it his full attention. Alternatively just make cooking your job and have him do the washing up, laundry, garden whatever it is that he can do confidentally. You can have some spag boll/stew/curry bathch cookedin the freezer for when he needs to prepare food.

Do you have a slow cooker OP?

One assumes eat fish fingers happily.

I can't cook as such, i can happily do breaded chicken/fish fingers and veg and potatoes. But I'd never make a shepherd's pie or curry. I am happy with ready made ones.

Need more info about how the chore/childcare/work burden is shared. If he does more in all other areas, I’d suck it up. If not, then he either takes on more chores or learns. I’m ok with someone being bad at something but trying to improve. Observer him doing the same meal every week so he can get into a pattern: boil water, put in pasta, set timer. Drain pasta. Heat up sauce. Pour over.

I would be pissed off about this because meal prep is soooooo relentless. A huge task just to fall to one person. It's not comparable to eg ironing.

One alternative might be that, if actually boiling pasta and adding jarred sauce is beyond him, he instead takes responsibility for perhaps two evening meals a week. Things like rotisserie chicken and pre prepped salad, smoked mackerel, couscous pots etc. That type of stuff. Not beige shit. And it's up to him to sort.

Men can cook. They just don’t want to because they see it as a woman’s job. I would not fucking stand for that level of contrived and strategic incompetence. Some people on here are total mugs.

I don’t mean you, OP.

My DH is absolutely prepared to cook and does so sometimes but it genuinely not great at it. He tends to get quite stressed and while it turns out OK it's definitely alot more effort for him than it is for me. He is competent in almost all areas and is definitely not doing it deliberately.

I actually enjoy cooking and work far fewer hours than him so at least in our house it's not a major problem for me to do almost all the cooking. I guess my point is that some people (not just men) do find it genuinely more tricky to cook - they would probably improve with practise but it's not necessarily deliberate on their part.

Never because you can't or someone else in your house does the cooking or something else?

No kids here. Boyfriend cooks most of the time as he enjoys it. I do much more of the admin - organising shopping and washing up etc.(plus organise all bills as my flat)

If one enjoys it let them do it. I don't care if I get given fish fingers snd peas every day.
I am not demanding any meal I am not happy to do myself.

Of course we’re all the same. All men are just being dicks. Choosing not to do a task.

I live on my own, with shared care of my kids. I do it all. Cool, clean, washing, diy, garden etc. like many others who post, men and women.

when I lived with a partner they weren’t great at cleaning, so I did more. That wasn’t strategic incompetence, just each doing what they were better at.

mamy women have posted saying they don’t cook, but I’m betting you don’t think they’re deliberately being bad at at and you won’t insult them. X

DH’s Dutch mum grew up in the Dutch East Indies and then lived in India for several years. She was a v good cook and taught DH loads of Indonesian and Indian recipes. He always came to the hospital and cooked my dinner in the doctors’ mess when I was on call. And managed to keep it hot until I could get out of the operating theatre!
There really is no excuse for a DH who can’t boil a pan of pasta - unless he has special needs, he is doing it deliberately to ensure you do all the cooking in future.
How do you want to deal with it, OP?
You could cook in exchange for him doing several other chores - not a good strategy if you are ever ill or away - you could insist on supervising him until he gets it right, or you could refuse to cook for him ever, just making meals for you and the DC. Or divorce him and replace with a man who does have basic life skills.

Of course he can cook. He just doesn't want to. That's a very different thing.

I assume there were periods of his life where he did not have a mother or girlfriend willing to cook all his meals so he was perfectly able to do some basic cooking then and did not rely on takeaways twice a day...

Be firm and state you want a better division of domestic tasks from now on.

I think this is a little different.

I am a good cook and DH finds it harder, it takes him longer and he isn't great at dealing with it when it goes wrong but he is absolutely competent to cook and does so less often than me but still a few times a week. That's very different to the OP's DH who can't boil filled pasta for 5 mins and then stir in some sauce. That's strategic incompetence - there is no way he is like that at work

😂

He doesn't gte distracted by something when he is driving.
He can learn if he wants to.
It has just never been on his priority list.
So time for serious talk and ultimatum.
Learn to cook 5 decent dishes over next 5 weeks and be prepared to repeat them for the next few months or you stop cooking. Once he is confident with those 5, he can add more.
My son is a uni student and in their house they all cook proper food! Take turns to cook. They can all do it, it really isn't rocket science.

This is very sensible advice.

It's what you've done, because you've had to. Everyone can follow recipes. Do NOT 'teach him to cook'. This is a job for him, not for you.

'I got distracted' = 'I didn't want to do that, so I did something else instead.' It's a statement of unashamed selfishness and self-indulgence.

My DH only ever made beige food. He started doing to hello fresh or Gousto meals we have and now cooks most nights.

They are fool proof and his confidence is huge now and he's loving cooking
Worth a try to start him off

My partner is a terrific cook and does 90% of the family cooking with a result that I’ve really let my skill slide. I was always only ok but now I find it extremely stressful on the odd occasion I have to cook, I get stressed and flustered . Not helped by him standing over me ‘helping’ and commenting. So I think of you want him to cook you have to give him a recepue then leave him alone to get on with it, fail, try again. I’m super stressed cooking for DP now so the cycle continues. Also he does most of the shopping so he knows what’s to hand and I don’t. I’m mega confident in other ways, I have the higher earning job and am the only driver etc