It’s not just the cooking that’s exhausting, it’s everything that comes before it.
The entire day you’ve had before you even step into the kitchen. Work, life, caring for others, and everything in between. And to be quite honest, the world feels heavy for a lot of people at the moment.
Then you get into the kitchen at 5pm (if you’re lucky), look around and think, what do I cook? And your brain just won’t work. It’s not because you don’t have food in the house, or don’t know how to put a meal together. It’s the decision fatigue that hits at the end of the day.
And maybe you have a family asking that age-old question, what’s for dinner? And honestly, you wish someone would just tell you the answer. You’re not lazy for not wanting to cook, it’s just too much some days. The grocery shopping, remembering what you need, timing meals around everything else, and then the cleaning up afterwards.
This is exactly why people fall back on their favourite, tried-and-tested meals. The ones they know how to make, the ones everyone will eat. They require less thinking because you almost know them by heart. It’s why easy dinners exist.
And then there are the days we default to eggs on toast or a bowl of cereal. Not because we’re lazy, but because we’re exhausted.
It’s honestly why I meal plan the way I do. Even though I love cooking and do it for a job, I still get to the end of the day sometimes and think, I just can’t be bothered today.
I always stick to a loose meal plan, not a rigid one. I plan the meals I’ll have for the week so I can write my grocery list, but I don’t assign them to specific days. If I get to a day and don’t feel like what I planned, I’ll switch it. I use the ingredients I have and make something else. Nothing gets wasted, it just changes slightly. Because honestly, a rigid meal plan just wouldn’t work for me.
I also keep a small rotation of simple meals that I make most weeks. Easy chicken burgers, simple meat and veg, things like that. That way, on the nights I’m busy or cooking late, I have something quick to fall back on. And on other nights, I might cook something a bit different to keep things interesting.
I’m not afraid to use convenience when I need it either. You know I’m all about home cooking, but there are days I don’t have time or I need something extra to make a meal work. I’ll buy a BBQ chicken for an easy salad or wraps, or grab a salad kit to go alongside dinner. You can love cooking from scratch and still use convenience sometimes. Both things can be true.
I always have a couple of quicker options in the freezer too, like dumplings, homemade frozen pizzas, or even meals I made prior and froze some of.
And not every dish needs to be MasterChef quality. Sometimes a simple meat and vegetables is exactly what you need. Simple doesn’t mean lacking flavour. And doing these things really helps me.
Some weeks cooking feels easy, other weeks it feels like a lot. Both are normal, and both are part of real life in the kitchen. And just as a reminder we all feel like this from time to time, even your foodie Instagramers or recipe creators, we are just people too and sometimes just can't be bothered.