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'm a fairly good cook but it's just because I have been cooking all of my own meals for most of my adult life. Cooking is not something I enjoy, I consider it a chore, but I find it hard to go wrong. I don't measure anything. I judge everything by eye and don't use recipes, I just combine whatever ingredients I have in the fridge and cupboards. I am a creature of habit so I eat the same dishes over a two week period, so most things I cook I have cooked hundreds of times before.
When I do experiment with new recipes (such as my attempts at baking in lockdown) I found that even when they go wrong, the end result is still edible and nice, even if it has the wrong texture, home-made things taste so much better than processed products from a shop that have been on a shelf for ages.
Before I learnt to cook properly there was a few years in my teenage years where I ate the worst diet possible and ended up suffering from malnutrition. With everything in my life - cooking, cleaning, personal finances, personal hygiene, etc - I had to fail at it catastrophically before I learnt how to do it, and then from that point on I purposefully got good at it because I didn't ever want to suffer over it again. So my life is a history of massive failure and then learning from those mistakes.