Do you enjoy cooking?

I used to cook. And follow recipes. After retirement - nope. Now I just ‘assemble’ stuff. I put chicken legs in the oven with butter and herbs, slide in spuds to make delicious jacket potatoes, bake salmon fillets and slide in a tray of Mediterranean veg alongside. Good quality foods, no fiddling about, little washing up.
#lazygran

I don’t need to batch cook to stock up a freezer as we live above Sainsbury’s. I go down in the lift - I call it my larder - I often choose on the day what I fancy to eat. Charlie Bigham’s are delicious!

I enjoy cooking, finding it very therapeutic. I cook from scratch, but don’t like spending hours preparing dinner, or strictly following a recipe. However, I do look at recipes and then adapt them. Also, I make bread and cakes. It is always a bonus when our home grown vegetables and fruit are ready to pick.

I have taken to cooking in a big way since retirement. Probably my greatest joy is in devising and cooking meals and desserts for our one year old grand daughter.
As a vegetarian, I tend to draw on middle eastern and southern european ideas and ingredients.

Like BlueBelle I hate anything kitchen related. I just go in there to clean or wash up. Fortunately my husband does all the cooking and shopping.
He does tend to refer to the oven as "the magic box food comes out of" its worth putting up with his sarcasm to get my meals cooked

I cooked for the family and for constant visitors for many years. My husband didn't know where the kitchen was in those days!! However after a serious op I had, he took over the cooking and discovered he loved it! My new task was printing off recipes from websites and he would follow the instructions religiously. Friends really LOVED his cooking. Now he's passed I cook for myself only and have discovered I really like using my Mini Airfryer. Baking is another matter!

I hate cooking. I think it goes back to my youth: I have a very unhealthy relationship with food and was probably close to being anorexic. Also cooking and meals weren’t a big part of my childhood. I occasionally went to town meals wise when we used to have French students staying. I actually started cooking more when the pandemic hit because I liked the idea of no food wastage: learned how to cook lentils and had replenished my store cupboard with pasta, lentils, spices etc in the run up to lockdowns because I could see the way things were heading. Now my poor hands are full of arthritis and Dupuytrens cooking is quite painful. I did see some recipes in the Times the other day aimed at young people going to uni that appealed to me! As my FIL used to say, some people live to eat and some eat to live and I was one of the latter. When I’m at my partners he’s someone that likes us to sit down at 5 and have a meal together and sort of expects me to cook it, but I find that difficult because sometimes I just fancy a cheese sandwich and a packet of crisps at 4pm. Pre pandemic, when we used to have friends round we always used to get a load of M&S curries and a trifle! I would love to be rich enough to go to restaurants and try lots of different foods even though imo nothing beats fried egg on toast if I can get the yolk just right ( which I rarely can: it usually gets just a bit too hard).

I love cooking, just not for only me.
If I have people to cook for I'm in my element although I musr admit I normally cook way too much.

I do but I have to be in the right mood usually once a week. OH does quite a bit but doesn’t do baking

My favourite time of day is about now when I start the evening meal.
We put the tv on, pour a drink and catch up on our days.

I do some batch cooking and we are not averse to the odd Charlie Bigham, takeaway or a bought prize winning pie but my favourite thing is playing around with recipes.

I seem to go through phases of really enjoying it or finding it a chore. At the moment I love it. I am very good at cooking but not very good at baking

Orlin does the cooking in our house, I clean up after him.
He once told my colleagues at a works do that he had whisked me off to somewhere I’d never been before, while everyone was looking on with admiration and waiting to hear the romantic destination he announced that it was the kitchen.

Oh laura, that's funny

Love it LauraNorderr! 🤣

LauraNorderr
😂😂😂

I love to cook, prepare the ingredients, take care to a garden, lay the table - all of it really. I'm a very good, albeit slow, cook and baker.

I used to love finding a new, unusual, recipe and cooking for DH and me on Saturday nights when the DC were safely tucked up in bed 🙂

Now, well, it's something good but quick and easy eg steak and trimmings, Charlie Bigham or Gastropub!

I love cooking ,I spend most of my time in the kitchen .I dont have lots of machines ,no stand mixer or food processor as I enjoy prepping the old fashioned way with good knives .I make soup almost every day and my OH tells anyone who'll listen that he's the best fed man in the shire .
Downside of that is when we do go out to eat he always says its not as good as he'd have t home!
Today was spent baking for my sister and my neighbour ,both widowed last week.Theres been a constant stream of visitors to both so I've been taking a supply of cake ,scones and pancakes over every couple of days.One less thing for them to think about .Tomorrow I have my 4 year old GD for her 2nd "cookery lesson" its sure to be fun .I've taught my own kids and the other 4 GC from when they were 4and they can all cook very well

We bought an automatic pasta maker so we are having a lot of pasta and noodle dishes. Mostly I cook Asian food anyway because it is quick and tasty and you can vary the ingredients easily. I like cooking when I am in the mood. We also have an ‘instant pot’ steamer which I am gradually coming to terms with. Last night I did a tomato, beef and olive hotpot in it with home made spaghetti and that worked out well. Lots of red wine in the mix!

Now a widow and after 30 plus years of professional writing and testing recipes, not so much. However, I am not a big fan of ready meals, although I do buy them occasionally. Mostly I go for old favourites that are quick to prepare.

I really find cooking a chore. I never learnt as I was growing up. I was always asking my DH how to cook things when we first got married, such as custard, gravy, all the basics!

If I was on my own I would live on poached eggs, bread and cheese and fill up on fruit.

Fortunately once or twice a week DH takes over and he is a good cook. Last night for my birthday he cooked, venison steaks with a peppercorn sauce, large juicy mushrooms, chips, peas, delicious.

I used to love cooking and baking .
I'd cater for huge parties .
I still cook if needs be , but my cooking has become quick and lazy .

I used to quite enjoy cooking but now it's a chore. DH has become really picky: doesn't like this, doesn't want that. I'm tempted to buy him a load of M&S one person meals and tell him to get on with it, I'll cook for myself.

Sago

I love it, I’m happiest preparing and planning meals.
I make all my own bread, butter and even posts and grind my own Indian spices for Garam Masala etc.

My mother was a miserable cook, everything was served with a big dollop of resentment.

My MIL was like this, she wasn't interested in food at all, eating or cooking. We used to travel a long way to see her and she used to make dried up frozen sausage rolls for the children, with out of date orange squash and biscuits.
On one occasion we took her to a local hotel for a nice lunch, a wide choice of traditional and other dishes. Afterwards she said it had been OK but she didn't want us to take her out again, which would have meant the usual three or four hour visit with no proper meal, nothing for the children to do, and absolutely no TV.
And then she wondered why we didn't go too often.

Esmay

I used to love cooking and baking .
I'd cater for huge parties .
I still cook if needs be , but my cooking has become quick and lazy .

Yes, I did this too, 120 people or so. But we don't have the room or the number of friends any longer!
My everyday cooking is fairly simple because that is what my husband likes. I often feed my grandchildren after school but tend to give them pasta because I can prepare it in advance and I know they will eat it!
If family come round I usually do a big roast dinner. My children have busy lives and say that they don't often have time to do it for themselves, though they all enjoy it.
I can't say that I do much baking any longer, we are both watching our weight, though I do make birthday cakes and desserts.

I really like to cook, and it's something I'm good at. Yes for me it's therpeutic, a bit like gardening. My family (husband, children&partners, grandchildren) prefer to eat in, not going to a restaurant. I cook meals from all over the world - yes I'm blessed to live in a place where I can get most ingredients. We also like to receive, our friends are always happy to be invited. But sometimes this gives me a problem : my husbands just loves to choose recipes, and although I always have the last word on the menu, he always picks things that take a lot of time/work/preparation. If and when I tell him that, he looks very disappointed, says things like "I thought that for John*and Jane* we might go full out". I usually give in. He always offers to help but I hate cooking together (my bad, sorry). He does most of the shopping though, especially picking up orders from the cheese merchant, fishmongers or the butchers etc., and he does the starters or other small bites that go with the apérif. He does that very nicely, creatively!
The only times I don't like to cook is when I don't like the people I'm cooking for. As we all know, that happens too 😊