Why I Hate Cooking

While it took many years to realize this about myself, I have a great antipathy towards things I was forced to do as a child growing up. Mind you, my parents are lovely people, and nothing horrible happened – that was just my perception of the activity. There are reasons why I hate cooking.

My punishment might be an hour of weeding the garden when I would get in trouble. My mother either loved gardening or wanted to save money because her gardens were enormous. So, weeding is punishment, and therefore, I wouldn’t ever say I like gardening or yard work.

As an adult, I solved this problem by avoiding the activity or, once I had enough income, paying someone else to tend my minimal yard just enough to keep people off my back about the untidiness. I don’t spend time outside, so I don’t care how the yard around my house looks.

When I First Started Cooking

While I don’t remember cooking as punishment, I didn’t want to do it. Yet, my mother worked full-time, so I was responsible for age-appropriate cooking duties nearly daily as I aged. After I left home, I had to cook, or I would have starved.

I was pretty poor, which is typical, I believe. I rotated through three dishes that I could make without a recipe. This included spaghetti, tuna and noodle casserole (which I can’t stand now), and meatloaf (which always turned out horrible). These are the ones I can remember after all these years.

If I needed to stray from these, I had to use a recipe. I still can not cook without a recipe for any new dish, but I’ve added one dish to my no-recipe-needed portfolio: chili in my Instant Pot™.

When I married, I was fortunate as my husband liked to cook and was a fantastic cook. He cooked, and I cleaned up the kitchen. It was great. Unfortunately, we divorced almost 20 years ago now, and I’ve been on my own in the kitchen ever since.

How I Survived

A co-worker who knew me well bought me a refrigerator magnet that says, “I only have a kitchen because it came with the house,” which has been a pretty accurate assessment of me and the kitchen. After all these years, my repertoire was down to spaghetti or meatloaf (still horrible), as I could no longer eat tuna and noodle casserole.

I was bringing home more money, so I started eating out. It was great because I could bring home the leftovers and have two or three more meals from that one meal out. I would eat a meal, usually dinner, with my parents at least once a week and typically bring home leftovers from that meal and sometimes a couple of others that my parents had made that week. Score!

The Decision To Improve My Health

So, I decided to retire from my sometimes more than full-time job as a governmental accountant in April 2023. I had two goals I wanted to tackle once I retired. First, I want to improve my health (hence this focus on cooking) and achieve a certificate in the Master of Hand Knitting course The Knitting Guild Association offers.

I did not get started right away on either of these goals as I contracted back to my company to continue the handoff of my duties to the remaining staff and get them through their financial audit. After completing that work in early October 2023, I tried to get started, but it hasn’t been going well.

I have many excuses, including traveling (OK, that one is legit), working on my house, holidays, and many more. However, that has to stop, and I need to buckle down and get started on this journey.

Why I Started This Blog

So why did I decide on a blog? I have found that I need accountability to make me stick to things I have set as a goal but that I don’t like to do(e.g., exercise). To keep exercising, I pay for a personal trainer, and I have for almost ten years.

So, this blog is my intended to be my accountability. Friends and family can check in on how I am doing and call me to account if I am not blogging (less likely) or not cooking (entirely likely). I got the idea after my cooking disaster last weekend with a batch of egg bites, but I’ll talk more about that in a later blog.

My intention is to document what went wrong, show my work (everone needs a laugh – right?), and maybe provide results from research I will need to do to understand what went wrong. So, let’s get started….