I’m no stranger to cooking. I am fairly skilled and slightly adventurous. I worked in a high-level kitchen for many years and have seen every episode of Good Eats. I have good knives. My mother was a very competent cook and while not a gourmet, can and did whip up anything from The Joy Of Cooking.
I’ve lived alone for over 10 years now. For many of those years I cooked & baked for myself and for several years I cooked very well for myself as I diligently watched my diet.
Then I realized it sucked. I hate planning, shopping, cooking, cleaning and even now eating. I hated thinking about food all the time. I hated making something and having leftovers and having the leftovers staring at me making me feel bad about wasting time and money by not eating them. I hated the amount of time that went in to making food and cleaning up after it and how it was double or triple the time I spent actually eating the food.
Cooking for one is just about the fucking worst thing ever. I am so over it. Soooooo over. I could go on and on about what is so horrible about it but no one wants to hear any more.
Now I go to my parents 2-3 times a week for dinner (they are feeding my brother and nieces, they might as well feed me! I do the dishes for them), maybe do a sandwich or cereal here a day or two, then eat out at one of the hundreds of restaurants in the area the rest of the time. Breakfast and lunch are no-cook affairs here.
Trust me, this has nothing to do with my mother. Or my pickiness. Or my competency. It’s just the crushing mockery of cooking for one.
I cook but my husband doesn’t, so I’m kinda answering for him. As someone born in the 50s, he had a stay-at-home-mom who took care of the house and ran the kitchen. To this day, it’s tough to have her yield control in the kitchen, altho last time we had Thanksgiving there, she did let me help out a good bit.
Anyway, she didn’t want or need help as a young wife and mother, so she never taught her sons to cook and they were never interested in learning. My husband married right out of high school, so he went from Mom to wife doing the cooking, and when his ex left him, he wound up back with his parents. I met him a few months after his divorce was finalized, and apart from occasionally manning the grill, I handle all the food prep.
He has offered to help in the kitchen many times, but he truly hates to cook. A few times when we were in relocation transition (he went ahead, I waited till our daughter was done with school) I’d send him meals that just needed to go in the microwave, but even that was more than he wanted to do. He’ll eat a bowl of cereal rather than take out a saucepan. I’m pretty sure if I wasn’t around, he’d get takeout most of the time. In fact, 2 years ago, I went on a 4-week cruise with my mother, and I don’t think he turned on the stove once while I was gone.
It’s just not something that he wants to do. Ever.
I had to snip this bit from ZipperJJ, because this it 100% true for me too:
My mom cooked every night, and still does, even though it’s just for her and my dad, so it has nothing to do with how I was raised. I have an ambivalent relationship with food, and I loathe putting effort and planning into the whole process. I may not cook, but I also don’t eat boxed foods or fast food. I just have a different definition of what a meal is than most people. I’m perfectly happy to eat a baked potato (it doesn’t count as cooking in my book, since there’s one “ingredient” and zero clean up) topped with cold beans and a hard boiled egg from the salad bar and call it lunch.
This is me! I am an adventurous eater who is very into all sorts of snobby dining when I am in a restaurant.
However, I don’t like to cook and I’m not good at it, and I’m not even interested in getting better at it. When left to my own devices to eat dinner from my kitchen, I’ll usually stand at the counter and dip some saltines in peanut butter.
Oh, since we’re talking about how we were raised … my mom is a very good cook. But cooking, for her, was her relaxation time to herself. I don’t think she intentionally decided never to teach me to cook … but it worked out that way because it was always easiest for her just to prepare meals instead of slowing everything down to work through a kid’s learning curve.
Food in general and therefore the cooking of it is of very little interest to me. When I had a boyfriend I would cook most weekends but it wasn’t anything fancy and I didn’t really enjoy it. Now I just don’t see the point.
As to how I was raised, my mom cooked just about every night and pretty much kept it simple. We had typical things like meatloaf and chicken and spaghetti, all if which I ate and still like but rarely cook. So I think the biggest influence my childhood has on my current cooking habits is that I was part of a family, and parents cook for their children. If I had a child or even an SO I’d cook (but I still wouldn’t particularly enjoy it).
Then when my mother went back to work, when I was about 13, it became my job to cook the family meal. Good deal actually, if had I had dinner on the table when they came home from work, the rest of the night was mine. I’d get home from school, crank up the stereo or call a friend (phone in the kitchen had a long cord) and start dinner.
Now I seldom cook. It’s just my son and me and he’s a pretty picky eater. Also, he tends to stay up all night and sleep all day, while I’m up during the day and sleep at night, so we are on different schedules. It’s no fun cooking for one. Frozen meatballs may not be as good as homemade, but they are good enough. Jarred spaghetti sauce isn’t as good as mine, but add some ground beef and some spices and it’s good enough. He could live on frozen pizza with the occasional fish sticks, TV dinner, or Taco Bell thrown in. Sometimes I cook up something quick we both like.
Mostly though, it’s just not worth it to cook homemade anymore.
My parents didn’t have a lot of money (we never had a car :eek: and only got a TV when I was about 12.)
So Mum made home-cooked meals all the time (we never ate out, nor ordered takeaway.)
I didn’t cook myself until I was 55 (previously I ate at work, ate out, microwaved stuff or had takeaway.)
Now I have mastered making:
I have very simple tastes - I like meat and potatoes, simple veggies, etc. That was pretty much what we ate when I was a kid in the 70s–my mom cooked dinner every weeknight, and it was always nice simple stuff like casseroles, hot dogs, etc. Occasionally she’d get inspired to make something “fancy” which I rarely liked.
The other thing was, she never let me help cook. She always had the idea that it was just easier to do it herself than to let anyone help, so I had very few chores to do around the house. This has hurt me as an adult, both because I don’t know how to cook and I’m not very good at cleaning, either.
I’m trying to learn to cook, though–at least a few simple recipes that the spouse and I both like, that aren’t too hard to make. Recently I learned simple stir-fry, and that was a success. So we’ll see. But I will never become a gourmet cook, because I don’t like that kind of food and thus have zero motivation to learn to make it.
My parents married at the peak of the great depression, neither had high school education. Meals were home cooked from scratch, on the table three times a day, and the whole family was together for every one of them. Anything else was unimaginable. The town I grew up in had an A&W Root Beer stand, what we might go to once a month as a treat, but never for a meal. My mom had no freezer, she had an ice-box, and a man with a truck brought a block of ice a couple times a week. There was a kitchen garden, and shelves and shelves of jars of home-grown produce waiting for winter.
I have all the modern conveniences now, but I still approach meals with the same philosophy, and raised my own family according to it.
I love to eat and like a wide variety of foods. I CAN cook, I just don’t like to and for one person it is a pain in the behind. planning, purchasing, prepping, cooking, cleaning is about 4x the effort I want to make. Take out or fast food while not as healthy maybe is a whole lot easier.
Both my parents cooked and eat a wide variety of foods in fact more than I do. My brother is a gourmet cook.
Your friend’s preferences are not, in fact, similar to mine. My problem is with cooking, not eating. I am happy to eat an elaborate meal that someone else prepared. But I live alone, do not have much experience with or talent for cooking, and do not enjoy cooking. I also have carpal tunnel syndrome and am somewhat limited when it comes to how much chopping. stirring, etc., I can do without pain.
I can cook, I’ve been complimented on my cooking, it just isn’t worth it. People act like cooking from scratch saves you oodles of money but that isn’t my experience. After you factor in all the costs of ingredients, the cost of a meal is really not much better than something premade.
Plus I do not have a dishwasher, so every dish needs to be washed by hand.
Plus, in order to make it worth it, I usually end up cooking in bulk. Problem with that is that I get sick of something after 3 meals of it.
Save very little money (if any) compared to packaged food
Tons of prep time
Tons of clean up time
Have to either cook a small amount and therefore have more prep and cleanup time, or cook a large amount and get sick of the food.
I’m 55. A guy. Raised in a family where Mom cooked. Back in the '70s in Illinois. She would make some exotic things like sweet and sour pork, egg foo young. And the standard fare. Casseroles and such. I did find cooking as kind of a science experiment, and started pretty early.
Then, in my late 20’s I had a 2nd shift job. Get home at 11pm while my room mates where asleep. I could not go to sleep, or crank up the tunes… so… I started cooking for something to do.
My Wife and I live where take out is not an option. So I cook weekends for the week. And we often just wing it.
I’m a good cook in my opinion. My family thinks I’m fantastic. I’m not. I just know my way around a kitchen.
Growing up, food was just meh for me. Skinny kid whose fantasy meal would have been Captain Crunch for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I was also the 5th girl, so by the time I came along, my older sisters were already mom/grandmas’ sous chef.
But as an adult, I WANT to learn to cook. How do I learn without spending a fortune on cooking classes?? I try to follow recipes, but somehow it never comes out like it’s supposed to
Watch cooking shows. Seriously. There’s a lot of technique which is not nearly as intuitive as the people who grew up cooking think.
Bleah—whining resentment of bad childhood deleted. But while a lot of people in this thread are giving the lie to the OP’s biases, I am their poster child.
You raise very valid points. I personally hate left overs. However, most of my cooking neither involves tons of prep time or cleaning up time or leftovers? I usually spend less than 15 minutes per day in actual cooking although it does require a bit of planning in regards to growing, harvesting, shopping, and cooking.
It saves a ton of money. I bought a $1 package of lettuce seeds and we have lettuce overflowing the pots. How much does lettuce cost in the store? You can buy brown rice for less than a dollar a pound, and dried beans are dirt cheap and easy to prepare in a crock pot. Potatoes and carrots are cheap even if you don’t grow your own.
I doubt this has much to do with upbringing. I love everything about cooking. I cook just about everything my husband and i eat from scratch, no processed foods beyond canned tomatoes. If you asked me to whip up some Thai food right now, at 10:30 pm, or make a lasagna, I’d be happy to do it. My sister, two years younger than me, doesn’t enjoy cooking at all, and rarely makes anything more complicated than scrambled eggs. We were raised in the same house with the same mom, who is an unenthusiastic cook who eats a lot of frozen dinners. Different personalities.
Just a suggestion: Cook a largish amount & freeze some. Won’t work for every meal, but I’m pretty good about putting rice, etc., in freezer bags. My freezer is small, so things don’t wait very long. Far better than letting leftovers decay in the refrigerator.
(On work days, I buy a lunch that even includes vegetables. But I like to cook & do, most nights. Tonight, though I had brisket eggrolls from a handy food truck!)
