Published on 12, July, 2020
Does anyone struggle with cooking?
I’ve been trying to lose a bit of weight and thought that cooking fresh meals instead of having microwave/ready made meals would be better for me - but when it comes to cooking I really struggle to follow instructions and when I do and come to eat the food it’s not very nice.
For example, I was recently using one of those “Maggi cook in a bag” and it asks for 100ml of water for a meal that they say serves 4 but as it was just me eating the meal I would (after being told/snapped at by my mum) need to quarter it - i didn’t realise this and it has since meant having to cool more food.
The best way to describe it is that my brain likes to read and re-read the instructions but when it comes to doing them, I completely forget/don’t realise I’m doing it wrong - I do have dyslexia too so maybe it could be just that?
I’m still yet to be diagnosed but wondered if this was something other people experienced.
I mean when cooking, you only learn as you are doing it, so even if you just cooked all 100ml of the food this time, you learned about servings sizes and how to divide them for one person next time. It might take time to cool a larger portion of food, but it's not like it's an impossible thing to do, and you're still new to cooking, and a part of cooking is learning as you go.
Sometimes with recipes, you can draw out a picture for the measuring sizes, ingredients, and food preperation, to have a better understanding of what to do. I mean I know someone that works as a cook that was not the best student in school and would fall asleep trying to comprehend anything that's only in writing, so she draws all her recipes on index cards with a few words on them, to keep everything as simple as possible.
And maybe if you're not good at drawing, having something like text-to-speech that reads things out loud in the recipe for you, might help as well.
I had dyscalculia (dyslexia with numbers) and a math phobia, so I can mix up the numbers and the amounts without knowing it if I'm not careful. I really had to use visuals and another numbering method to cross-check that the number I'm reading is actually the right number, and I didn't switch the number positions around by accident without knowing it. I mean it still catches me off guard from time to time, so I understand how those with dyslexia can switch around letter positions when reading them, and how stressful that can be.