I don’t enjoy cooking. That’s right, I don’t. Never have.
There. I said it. Sometimes when I admit that to others, people give me a strange look. It’s as if I was born missing a gene that others just assume are part of every woman’s genetic make up. I’ve tried over the years to experience the satisfaction and enjoyment that others seem to feel, but it’s never meant much to me. It feels like a lot of effort with not much return.
Don’t get me wrong. I cook every single day, almost always from scratch, because I believe in eating well and I know what happens to your body when you don’t. I prefer whole ingredients, and I do try to avoid a lot of fast food and processed, boxed items as well. I just know how badly our entire food system is corrupted with a lot of additional ingredients that are created in a lab. I want to avoid that as much as possible.
But enjoying it? That’s a different story entirely. I’m not someone who finds the kitchen a creative outlet or a relaxing end-of-day ritual. I don’t lose track of time experimenting with new recipes or feel a swell of satisfaction when a dish comes together beautifully. I make food because I need to eat, I try to make it healthy, and then I move on with my day.
I have a feeling I’m not alone in this. I can’t be. At least, I hope I’m not—because if I am, then maybe there really is something wrong with me. But I believe otherwise. There must be many of us who don’t care that much about food and would rather focus our energy on something more fulfilling, while still wanting to take care of our health.
It’s easy to feel “othered”. The Internet is absolutely bursting with beautifully plated solo meals, artisan sourdough projects, and 45-minute weeknight dinners that somehow require thirteen ingredients — a lot of us are just quietly trying to get a decent meal on the table without making it the main event of our afternoon.
If you can relate, this one’s for you.
The Pressure to Love It
Cooking has always somehow been implied as a personality trait. In more traditional times, or within some ethnic cultures even today, a woman’s worth and identity was/is tied to her ability to be a creative cook. I didn’t have that. I was raised in a household with British roots. In that culture and coming out of post World War scarcity and economic limitations, the food was known for being boiled, non-spiced, pretty basic fare. So that’s what my mother was raised in, and that’s what she brought into my upbringing as well.
Memories & Impressionable Influences
When I was young, I knew that most families weren’t like mine when it came to the fridge, the groceries and the meal that arrived on the table. I grew up in an ethnically diverse lower middle-class neighbourhood in north Toronto. There were many first generation Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Indian, Eastern European, French Canadian and East Asian households.
I was always a little surprised to enter a friend’s home to the aroma of cooking. So many foreign smells and tastes, with food I wasn’t familiar with. You could even smell the cooking from the street in those days! Weirdly now, even though I’m sure everyone in my neighbourhood eats a wide variety of foods of the world with all of our access and exposure in the year 2026, I rarely smell any cooking from the households in my neighbourhood unless they’ve got something on the outdoor barbecue. What’s that all about?
At my home, other than the Sunday night pot roast, the food didn’t give off an aroma that I recall. I remember at the age of 16 going to my boyfriend’s house and experiencing salt, pepper and garlic. That was new to me. When the spices became more diverse, I generally tapped out, sticking with rice & salad because many of the spiced meats and vegetables in their Japanese household were beyond my palate preferences.
At the age of 64, I’m a long way from those early days. But honestly, adding many spices and sauces to something was more than I was used to by the time I had established my food tastes.
My mother was a single mother, raising 3 kids on a very small income. She was gone from the house from 6:30 am to 6:00 pm. Most of the food for our meals arrived via a frozen food truck that came once a month. The man from Chambers Food Club would carry in the boxes and deposit them into a rather large chest freezer sitting on the cement floor of our unfinished basement. Frozen vegetables, white bread loaves, pot roasts for Sundays, pork chops and Salisbury steak. They all sat alongside my two favourite desserts, Sarah Lee chocolate cakes and a tub of Neapolitan ice cream.
This meant my mother’s Saturday morning trips to the grocery store (Dominion, for those who are nostalgic), could be done quickly as she only needed to supplement with milk, butter, pb&j, processed cheese slices, apples and eggs. Her grocery list was organized in order. Something I used to think a tad too anal and may have even rolled my eyes at in my teen years. But I’ve noticed my own disorganized bulleted list slowly being rejigged to at least categories as time goes by.
It really does make it easier when you create a list over time of all of the items you repeatedly buy, and then organize them based on where you’d find them in the grocery store. So I do it now too. Then, when I see I am running out, I can quickly call up my Notes app on my phone, where said list resides, and click on the bullet. When I eventually make it to the store, I can easily pull out my phone, and voila, the list calls the shots. Did I mention I hate shopping? This gets me in and out in a very efficient manner.
In my childhood home, our meals were on a 14-day rotation which were recorded on paper and taped to the fridge for easy communication (right beside the dreaded “rotating chores” list).
There were no freeloaders in my mother’s household. We learned early that everyone had to pitch in if we wanted to eat before bedtime. The system she created—though it might seem really dull to those from homes with non-working mothers with passed down treasured family recipes—was likely the only way she could manage a limited budget and ensure we had three square meals a day without running out of food before the month ended.
My mother also hated cooking and baking, stating that her mother grew up with an aversion to any kitchen work. So perhaps I am attributing her highly scheduled and uninspiring menus to being a working mom, when in fact, even if she had stayed home, we might have had the same system in place.
Today, even though most moms also work outside the home, the surge of cooking shows, food influencers, TikTok recipe videos, and gourmet meal-kit deliveries has created a cultural expectation: if you truly care about yourself, your family, and your health, you should be passionate about the art of cooking. Bonus points if you grow your own herbs and own a mandoline slicer.
Despite what we may see on social media, the truth is, you can care enormously about what goes into your body without caring at all about the performance of cooking. Those are two entirely different things.
Food Without the Fuss: My Actual Approach
So here’s how I actually do it.
My goal when I walk into the kitchen is simple: make something that covers the food groups, a variety of colours in the veg, and takes as little time as reasonably possible. It also shouldn’t leave me with a sinkful of dishes I’ll resent later. That’s it. I’m not trying to impress anyone. There’s no one to impress. There’s just me, and my body that needs fuel.
I keep ingredients basic. I’m not adding the splash of white wine that would probably make the dish lovely, or the fresh herbs that would add brightness, or the specialty ingredient the recipe insists is “non-negotiable.” Those extras add to the grocery bill and, honestly, to the effort. I’d rather get in and get out.
What I do think about is balance — a protein, a vegetable and a starch or grain, or instead two vegetables. Cover the bases, don’t overthink it, done. Cut peeling and chopping down to a minimum.
And perhaps my most useful kitchen strategy: I cook for more than one meal at a time. Ideally 3 meals is what works for me.
Not in some elaborate eight-containers-labelled kind of way. I just make a larger portion than I need tonight, so that tomorrow — or the day after — I’m not starting all over. Leftovers aren’t a consolation prize. For me, they’re the whole point. Fewer trips to the kitchen means more time for literally everything else.
I find it comforting when I’m out for the day, knowing that I have a home-cooked meal waiting for me in my fridge, and all that is required is a quick re-heat within minutes of returning home at the end of a busy afternoon.
And the game changer, keeping some ingredients already prepared, which can be done whenever the time suits. Things such as lentils, corn, beans, and having nuts, seeds and spreads like hummus on hand can be tossed so easily into such a wide variety of dishes. They change both the taste and the meal’s nutrients without going to a lot of effort.
The Oven Situation
A few years ago, my oven stopped working.
The stovetop still functioned perfectly, so I wasn’t in crisis — but no oven meant no baking, no broiling, no roasting. And replacing a whole range when you’re on a tight budget is just not always possible.
To add to the challenge, being a solo woman, I had no idea how to disconnect a range and find the muscle power to remove the dead appliance and haul it out of the house. I also wasn’t keen on finding the extra funds required to pay the store the ridiculous extra several hundreds they were going to charge for installation and haul-away services. And even then, they still required that I pull the appliance out of its current placement before they would take it away. So that pretty much stopped the process from moving forward. It’s just a part of the solo over-60 experience of life. I needed another solution.
So I did what a pragmatic solo person does: I went on Amazon and bought a $200 air fryer, which arrived within days. And I ignored the broken oven. I discovered it makes a great storage cabinet for baking pans.
This air fryer has ten settings. It bakes, broils, toasts, and works as a convection oven. It sits on my counter and does everything I need it to do, for a fraction of the cost of a new appliance. Is it a gleaming, professional-grade kitchen setup? No. Does it get the job done? Absolutely.
I share this, not because air fryer content is having a moment (though apparently it is), but because it’s a good example of the kind of thinking that serves us well in solo midlife and beyond: resourceful over perfect. You don’t need the ideal setup to feed yourself well. You need to work with what you have and refuse to be derailed by what you don’t.
A stovetop, a microwave and a counter appliance. A handful of reliable dishwasher safe pans, strainers and utensils (that are not made of plastic). That’s my kitchen, and it works just fine.
The Meal Plan Experiment (A Brief and Cautionary Tale)
I want to be transparent about something I tried and genuinely could not sustain.
At one point, I considered adding a subpage to this blog dedicated to weekly meal plans and grocery lists and calling it Food Without the Fuss — a practical resource for other solos who were navigating the same low-motivation cooking reality. I sat down, started drafting the first grocery list, mapped out a few days of meals, and thought: yes, this is useful, people will love this. It’ll actually be easy, I thought. I’ll just record what I eat every day and take a few snapshots of it, and by the end of 7 days, I’ll have my first post. If I do this for about 4 weeks, I should have a pretty consistent record of what one can generally exist on, the ingredients lists, and food cost. It’ll be great!
Ya, not so much. I lost interest half way through week 2. Within 10 days, I’d abandoned the whole project. And so that info sits in perpetuity, where so many of my unrealized ‘great ideas’ go to die, in my Google drive. Seems I can’t even generate enough interest in ‘cooking for the disinterested cook’. Is that irony or stating the obvious lol.
I failed, not because it wasn’t a good idea in theory, but because producing it required enthusiasm I simply didn’t have. You cannot manufacture passion for something that genuinely doesn’t light you up. I tried to turn my tolerance for cooking into a content category, and my complete disinterest made that impossible.
I’m telling you this because I think it’s worth naming: not every productivity strategy works for every person. Rigid meal planning, as wonderful as it sounds on paper, requires a kind of food-forward thinking that isn’t how my brain works. And forcing a system that doesn’t fit you is its own form of exhaustion.
What works for me instead is a loose rhythm. A mental rotation of meals I know I can make on autopilot. A rough sense of what proteins I have on hand and what vegetables need to be used up before they quietly give up. Flexible enough to not feel like homework. Consistent enough to keep me eating well without much deliberation.
What “Good Enough” Actually Looks Like
Most people — whether they admit it or not — eat the same 15-20 meals on rotation. Solos just have less variety within the week to avoid wastage.
My month looks pretty predictable. My breakfasts and snacks consist of greek yogurt, berries, frozen sweet cherries, sometimes sour dough toast, avocados, bananas, protein shakes, protein pancakes, nuts and apples that sit a long time in my fridge because they are rarely my first choice. They infrequently become projectiles out of my back door, landing within reach for the squirrels and bunnies that have decided my backyard is the ultimate predator-free habitat for them.
There are a limited number of protein options I rotate through: always eggs in various forms, frequently chicken breasts though rarely cooked in it’s original form. No, for me the chicken breast gets cubed, sprinkled with olive oil and tossed into the fry pan, covered with some kind of sauce (soy sauce, sesame or Korean) and turned into some kind of tasty chicken bite that can be put over rice, added to pita bread, or saved for salads, stir frys and the occasional pasta.
Red meat comes and goes for me depending on the year but this year it’s back on the menu, usually ground beef (when I can convince myself it isn’t full of nostrils, lips and other nasty parts of the cow) or there’s a sale on pork tenderloins, always a bit of a letdown, but whatever.
And finally, the easiest and tastiest, a fully cooked smoked boneless ham that can be easily added to so many different meals (omelettes for breakfast, cobb salad for lunch, fried ham steaks for dinner). It’s inexpensive, tasty, and so fast and convenient.
Then, there are always the vegetables I reliably buy because I know I’ll actually use them. I watch the store ads for the best prices and go with what’s affordable that week: lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, already peeled baby carrots (because I’m lazy and Costco makes it so easy with their double pack), green beans, asparagus, sweet potatoes, grape tomatoes, pre-washed baby spinach, cucumbers, zucchini, frozen peas, peppers, onions, edamame and peaches-and-cream corn.
I’m trying to lay low on the starches now, the pasta and rice, but over a month they still make an appearance somewhere. If you’re a rice eater, buy yourself a rice cooker — it makes everything so easy. I bounce back and forth between Basmati and brown rice, never fully committing to either.
My spice cupboard: salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, Montreal chicken, Cajun seasoning, lemon & herb, garlic & roasted red pepper, vegetable seasoning, pumpkin pie spice and cinnamon. There’s also honey, soy sauce and a variety of vinegars and oils.
And my favourite technique is to take all of the main ingredients from a traditionally “structured” meal and just pile them or a suitable substitute onto a plate, mix, and put the word “lazy” in front of it.
Lazy tacos. All same ingredients but substitute the taco shells for tortilla chips and a heaping tbsp of guacamole & salsa too.
Lazy lasagna. A short noodle, leftover cooked ground beef, shredded cheese & cottage cheese, & tomato sauce.
Lazy Shepherd’s Pie. Leftover cooked ground beef, peas, and onions over Pillsbury flaky biscuits. I prefer this method over just buying a pot pie because there is so little protein in commercially prepared ones. This way I can ensure at least 30g of protein per meal.
Is every meal exciting? Absolutely not. But does my body feel well-nourished, my grocery bill stay manageable, and my time remain my own? Yes to all three.
There’s something confident about that, I think. Taking care of yourself without ceremony. Choosing health over convenience food. Showing up for your own nutritional needs even when — especially when — the motivation isn’t there.
And every once in a while, a tip comes along that actually sticks. I’m not immune. Though I said earlier that social media rarely inspires me to change my habits, I have to admit James Bok’s FB reels and Jamie Oliver’s recipes have earned spots in my rotation. Oliver’s egg muffin on the go — using a mug and a microwave — is genuinely brilliant. I have to share:
Pop an English muffin into the toaster. Get a big microwave-safe mug and spray it with cooking oil. Crack an egg into the mug, add a layer of already cooked veg from the fridge (your previous day’s leftovers), and layer with shredded cheddar cheese. Put it into the microwave for 2 minutes. Slide the cooked egg onto your toasted English muffin, wrap in tin foil, and you’re out the door with a tasty travelling breakfast!
Simple, fast, uses up leftovers, minimal dishes. My kind of cooking.
Permission to Just Feed Yourself
Here’s what I want to offer anyone who reads this and breathes a small sigh of relief: you are allowed to cook without loving it.
Living intentionally doesn’t mean performing a lifestyle you don’t actually have. It means making real choices that support your real life — including feeding yourself in a way that’s honest, affordable, balanced, and reasonably painless.
That’s not settling for inadequacy. That’s just good sense.
Are you a reluctant cook too? Do you have a go-to no-fuss meal that’s saved you on a low-motivation evening? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
For more on life in the second half, check out my other articles — and if you haven’t yet, you can also find me over on YouTube.
Michelle
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