Cooking for Thanksgiving versus cooking a few meals everyday is different

I enjoy cooking but like baking more.

I'm not a particularly creative cook but like trying new recipes and the satisfaction of enjoying something I made. I also enjoy coming up with ideas of what to make using what we have on hand to "cook down" the pantry/freezer.

We're empty nesters now and it's nice to not HAVE TO cook every night. I tend to cook 2-4x a week and we eat the leftovers other nights.

"cooking in the microwave" counts as cooking? Two year olds can cook!!!

Anonymous wrote:What is actully cooking? People are not growing rice in their backyards, are they? So they buy rice from a store and "prepare" it at home. Is that cooking? The buy veggies in a bag and heat up in microwave to eat with their rice that they prepared at home. What counts as cooking?

That’s cooking to me, especially if that is what time permits. If one has children or other significant at home duties, then cooking can be divided into phases - cooking a meal from scratch to cooking a meal, even if it involves minimal skills in doing so.

Anonymous wrote:What is actully cooking? People are not growing rice in their backyards, are they? So they buy rice from a store and "prepare" it at home. Is that cooking? The buy veggies in a bag and heat up in microwave to eat with their rice that they prepared at home. What counts as cooking?

When I "make rice" it means I cut a corner off a bag and microwaved it, or peeled back a top from a cup and microwaved it. When other people "cook rice" they do things with water and a pot on the stove, or an Instapot (I don't know exactly what). Even as a kid, when we "made rice" we made Minute Rice and it was really fast.

Anonymous wrote:I enjoyed it before kids. I grew up cooking and cooked in restaurants. Trying to please picky kids and the grind of daily meals has taken all the fun out of it.

Same (except I never worked in a restaurant). But my kids are picky including one with ARFID (an eating disorder) and I find it so relentless and stressful. My absolute favorite thing to eat is something I didn’t cook.

I used to enjoy it but the grind of providing 3 meals for my family every day for the last 15 years has made me not like it.

What is actully cooking? People are not growing rice in their backyards, are they? So they buy rice from a store and "prepare" it at home. Is that cooking? The buy veggies in a bag and heat up in microwave to eat with their rice that they prepared at home. What counts as cooking?

Grew up in a HH of 7, not a lot of money, rarely enough food for seconds. Our mom clearly found it very stressful. She made great pizza and chili as well as grilled burgers in the summer. The rest was okay. Once we were all out of the home and our parents were empty nesting, our dad did a fair amount of the cooking. He would read recipes in the local paper or Parade magazine on Sunday and try them. It was pretty sweet.

I cooked infrequently when I was first on my own. I did find a few recipes/dishes that worked for me and I would use them for dinner parties. When we had kids, we heated up a lot of prepared food from WF, etc. Then one day I realized I was so bored of rotisserie chicken and rice, that I started cooking.

My MiL doesn't like how I just don't "make something," but feel a need to make a nice meal. I don't like to eat boring shite, but I also love pulling off one pot/pan/sheet meals, so the food isn't necessarily fancy but maybe a few more steps (e.g., zesting lemon on steamed green beans).

There are some core meals I make that I know our now college-age kids love, so I serve them whenever they are home. That said, when our kids were at home, my goal was to cook 3-4x/week as well as on Sunday. We often ate out on F/Sat night and I would usually do one takeout meal (we live in a city) during the week, usually if DH was out for work/on the road. One of our DCs is a fairly picky eater though much less so as time goes by. I think my cooking helped her expand her palate as she has gotten older - she sees something on the menu that is similar to what I've made so she will take a chance.

It's been harder to cook as empty nesters, even though DH hates eating out more than 2-3x/week. There is a great Peruvian chicken restaurant and he loves that and doesn't consider it take out. Lately I've been trying somewhat easy recipes as I've been bored with making the usual. There are some core meals I make from the Pierre Franey 60-minute cookbook. I've made them so long, that it takes more like 45. They never disappoint.

Both our DCs are now living in group houses and they like to cook - I hope that part of that was instilled by me.

I generally enjoy cooking, but agree that the daily grind of it makes it a chore. I enjoy eating (healthy, nutritious) food more than the actual cooking, but since no one else I live with is willing to take on this job, I'm stuck with it.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not for the last almost two decades - I was never a good cook but tried, and then had to move to a home with VERY little counter space and a poorly laid-out kitchen, very final storage, no dishwasher, small oven, etc. So I don't like being in the kitchen. Growing up I had to cook dinner for the family once a week starting at age 7, and my weirdly passive-aggressive mother would always either claim to be too sick to eat, or eat what I made and then claim it made her sick. So that didn't really instill much confidence in me.

Now in my 40's, if I had a kitchen that worked well, I would love to make matzo ball soup. I could eat that every day. You can freeze portions of it (even the matzo ball) and just defrost as you want it.

This makes a huge difference. I just moved to a house that has basically an ideal kitchen (the couple who built it both worked for an architecture firm, and the house is more functional than I knew one could be), and it really does make an enormous difference.

+1. Not having the right equipment and/or a bad setup is awful. It makes cooking 100% harder.