From Gourmet Cook to Takeout Queen: Culinary Burnout Is for Real!

It's my turn to be waited on.

Author in her native habitat.

If you hit ❤️ at the top or bottom of this email, you will make me smile bigly and help others find this publication. THANK YOU SO MUCH!

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I have a confession to make.

I hate cooking.

Ok, I’m not being completely honest here. There was a brief time when I embraced culinary pursuits. This was when I was a young adult, and it had yet to become my job. I loved it when my then-husband showed me techniques I had never learned from my mother, like how not to overcook asparagus.

I was shocked the first time I ate this vegetable, and it didn't wrap around my fork like a piece of spaghetti.

But my role as chief cook bound me to years of planning, shopping, prepping and producing delicious, nutritious food for my family.

It was exhausting.

I wouldn't have felt so beleaguered by cooking if my then-husband had assisted in daily meal prep. He had outstanding culinary skills, which unfortunately only appeared when we had guests coming.

Voila! He'd whip up a spectacular five-star meal, which my children refused to eat, resulting in me cooking and serving them something else. 

I prepared nightly home-cooked meals for over twenty years while working one and sometimes two jobs. My then-husband's firm mandate of "no casseroles" and "no Campbell's soup recipes" was annoying because they could have been a real time-saver.

To make things worse, all the eaters in my home were finicky.

With the microscopic vision typical to young eyes, the kids would search for an offending green thing or a dreaded piece of chopped onion in a meatball. I’d find smatterings of green dots and onion squares scraped along the rim of the plates uneaten.

I refused to make bland food, and I continued seasoning my creations despite the harshness of my critics.

My wonderful mother-in-law taught me to make delicious eggplant parmesan, and I followed her instructions to the letter. The smell alone was worth making it! My children, however, were incensed at being served a vegetable as a meal and deemed it "horrible." To this day, they still remember how much they hated it, even though they all like eating eggplant now.

One of the reasons I started my daily wine-drinking habit is because, for what seemed like one hundred years, my son would sob whenever I placed his dinner plate in front of him. The first time it happened, I felt bad for him for having such big feelings, but every time afterward, it was simply infuriating.

Looking back, I think my boy may have had some sensory issues, but to me, at the time, he was another unsolvable problem. (My daughters do a spot-on impression of his mealtime cry, which he has yet to live down.)

Perhaps it's too late in this piece for you to believe that people considered me a pretty good cook and baker, despite my son’s tears.

My carrot cake won a blue ribbon at the church fair, and I was known for a solid A+ lasagna. My then-husband and current-husband cite the cake and the lasagne as good-enough reasons to have married me.

Weird coincidence, am I right?

A German cousin who once stayed at our house for a week called my meal preparatory services worthy of the moniker, "Ilona's Restaurant."

Of course, I had my share of flops.

Not frequently, but once too many times, I'd make a new recipe, and my then-husband would sample a bite, shake his head, and push the plate to the center of the table. My kids watched him do this. Then they’d screwed their little faces into question marks, and they'd stop eating, too.

That would be the end of the meal.

My biggest regret? Because of their discerning tastebuds, I've never been able to poison any of them.

For now, I cook dinner two to three times a week, and afterward, I'm ready for bed. I wonder, how did I ever do this every day? I guess the wine helped.

My current husband doesn't cook and subsisted on take-out as a life-long bachelor. A lover of pizza and Chinese food, he's okay with ordering.

I know this habit isn't good for me because the salt in restaurant food is too much. Somehow, I manage with a few low-effort meals like avocado toast or a tuna sandwich.

When the kids, their spouses, and the grandbabies visit, we order out. I tried cooking for ten people, but I end up a heap on the couch after everyone leaves.

Why do that to myself?

Not cooking means I have more time for writing and being outside in my garden. Working in nature creates a good kind of tiredness.

What is your favorite thing to do? Comments, please, and don’t be afraid to say you like to cook!! If that’s your jam, please invite me over. I’ll gratefully accept and bring a bouquet.

Here's me putting together one of my new compost bins.

I bought two bins so the compost can always be composting. One box is for new kitchen scraps, while the other is for heating up and breaking down the old.

Curley cue above composters is a tool for mixing the compost.

I’m proud that many people on Substack have embraced my photo of my pride-and-joy spring flowers in a vase.

Every week, I bury something fun at the bottom of the post. If you made it here, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I am headed to Greece and Portugal in a few weeks. If you’d like to receive a postcard from me on my travels, hit reply and give me your first and last name, and mailing address. Or you can send a separate email to [email protected].

Your address is safe with me. I won’t sell it, give it to the missionaries, or that guy who wants to sell you replacement windows.

My friend

Lindsey Dickson

gave me the idea, and she’s the first one to sign up.