I’m 42, and I’ve been cooking for a really long time.
When I was in my early-mid teens, I voluntarily took over a lot of the cooking in my family home. I got married when I was 19, and have been doing the majority of the cooking in my own home since then.
So, I’ve been cooking for almost 30 years at this point.
Probably my main thought about cooking is:
I don’t really enjoy the process.
Cooking for me has generally been more about an end result than the process.
I cook because I want to eat something in particular.
I cook because I want to save money.
I cook because I want to eat something healthy.
I cook because I want to bless my family.
I cook because I want to try new foods.
But if there were ways to get all those end results without cooking, I don’t think I’d shed a tear.
When I was a teenager and first started cooking, I think I enjoyed it maybe a little more than I do now (partly because it was new, partly because I had fewer responsibilities then than I do now).
Currently, though, I’d tell you that there are lots of reasons that I cook, but that most of those reasons have nothing to do with how much I love cooking.
I somewhat agree with you, but I do get some pleasure from going through the whole recipe-choosing–shopping–cooking–eating–cleaning up cycle somehow. I have been cooking for a bit longer than you, Kristen, and I get tired of HAVING to do it a couple of times a day, but usually it is not a pain like dusting or folding laundry, to me.
Part, I think, is the freedom to choose all by myself, what we eat. Now it is just two of us, and my husband does not enter the process till the eating part comes up. I think preparing food for him especially is a large part of our love language, and it is, now that I am retired, the only activity that I own independently except for seeing friends and talking/doing things with them.
So, although I am not the most imaginative cook, I basically enjoy it, especially now that I have time to do it better.
Well, you just took the words right off of my keyboard. I started cooking (badly) a few times a week when I was about 13, when my parents were both working full-time. I’m now 40, so that is also a lot of years in a kitchen. People often say something to me like, “It’s nice that cooking is a hobby for you, so you can enjoy being in the kitchen.”
No. I do not enjoy being in the kitchen to cook. Less and less as the years go on, actually. What I do enjoy are the other things associated with food: growing it, foraging for it, trying different ways of preserving it, the puzzle of how to combine disparate ingredients to make a meal. But the actual cooking? Nope.
Good thing I love it because I’ve had to do a lot of it my whole life. My husband can’t even make a sandwich right. I’ve taught my kids to cook though. I love even the process of cooking, even chopping veggies! I don’t need recipes to cook.i will often cook to avoid other chores. It’s a little hard to meal plan. That gets tricky.
My mother didn’t know how to cook when she got married, not even how to boil water, she said. So she made sure my sisters and I, in our teens, learned how.
I cook for all the reasons you mentioned, plus the “have to” factor. I would prefer to have a private chef or even exist on TV dinners if they weren’t so awful. Since I don’t like to cook, I still cook the same amount as when I had 4 kids at home (they’re all grown up) and we eat that for dinner, usually two nights. The rest goes into individual containers in the freezer. It’s nice to have dinners for back up in the freezer which gives me a reprieve on days I don’t feel like cooking. (Thank goodness for the microwave.) I also have a husband who likes nearly everything and doesn’t care if we eat the same thing for dinner seven nights a week. We don’t but . . . we could.
Wow, your thought mirror mine. I don’t love cooking but see the multitude of reasons to do so, like you.
I think when my husband retires, in a few years, I’ll ask him to do more cooking (and cleaning up afterwards). I have a wider variety of foods that I like, what can you do?
I don’t love cooking. I’m kind of indifferent to food, even, though that doesn’t stop me from eating — just stops me from healthy adventure and variety. Maybe not stops me, exactly, but I definitely could eat rice and beef and cottage cheese indefinitely.
But the people must be fed, they do demand variety, there is that thing about nutrition, and we must still have money left over for all the rest of the things, so cooking it is.
It’s better than the alternative!
I think I’m in the minority here as I love cooking. I work full time (not during lockdown obviously!) and my DH is an actor, internet tester and marketing guy so he’s at home loads and my friends all express surprise that he rarely cooks, which he can do. I love to come home, get changed out of my work clothes and start cooking tea. I cook from scratch 90% of the time and I find the experience therapeutic – chopping, stirring or whatever!