If you’re studying Food and Wine, you probably enjoy cooking like I do. For most of my adult life, I not only enjoyed cooking, I loved it. In my twenties, I hosted elaborate Passover dinners and cocktail parties in my small, dishwasher-free apartment. I would make special trips to the fish store or Asian market on weekday evenings to buy ingredients for dinner. In fact, I was so passionate about food and cooking that I left my career as a lawyer for the much less lucrative world of food writing and recipe development.

Even after having children, one with multiple food allergies and the other a known picky eater, I continued to love cooking. This was true even when cooking for my family took over my responsibilities as a food writer. Everything changed when the pandemic emerged.

As with many people, the pandemic broke something in me. There were four people in the house who wanted to eat all day every day. Going to the grocery store was like taking my life in my hands. And taking a break from the kitchen and heading to the restaurant wasn’t an option either. Of course, we could have ordered takeout, but that made me worried: Did I need to wipe down all the packaging as my neighbors recommended? Was I supporting the restaurant industry or exploiting low-wage workers like me who didn’t have the luxury of staying at home?

As the months passed, the constant cooking began to feel like a dreary, Sisyphean task. I got tired and resentful. In the worst case scenario, I found myself yelling at my daughter for eating leftover rice (the last rice in the house) that I had saved for her brother.

In short, I was hurt. We throw around the term “burnout” casually, but it actually has a precise meaning. Agata KubinskaA Chicago-based psychotherapist defines burnout as “the mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion that occurs over time as a result of having to do something that drains your energy and not taking the time to refill your tank.” Kubinska says that among the first signs of burnout is the loss of pleasure in activities once enjoyed.

When Food & Wine editor-in-chief Hunter Lewis wrote that he felt burnt out in March 2021, at the height of the pandemic, scores of readers responded; Everyone seemed to like the idea of ​​cooking during this difficult time, but not so much the actual execution (or the dishes that came after).

It’s easy to see how cooking burnout could occur even without the added stress of the pandemic. Kubinska notes that “if one person is the main cook in the family, (the person) may feel solely responsible for meeting the nutritional needs of his family.” It’s a huge and important task, Kubinska says, and adds significantly to a person’s “mental load,” an increasingly popular term to describe “the cognitive and emotional effort required to run a household.” “This invisible mental and emotional effort that builds over time can feel draining, especially if you have picky eaters, varied diets, and allergies to keep in mind when meal planning.”

That was me. I was exhausted and didn’t know how to refill my tank, but my family still had to eat. My first instinct was to make cooking easier. During the pandemic, Lewis has found it helpful to lean into easier recipes to keep things interesting, going back to the basics and long-time favorites and adding a fun new condiment or two to the pot and the table. This stance was logical and had great weight behind it. In fact, food media is constantly promising new ways to make dinner easier, faster, and more convenient. Entire industries have emerged to take the stress out of mealtime. Appliances like the Instant Pot and the air fryer—both of which I wrote cookbooks for—were supposed to revolutionize the way we cook and eat.

I tried all these solutions and more, but none of them actually solved my problem. Making meal prep easier and using shortcuts meant I spent less time cooking, and I still resented the time I spent doing it. Cooking has become less enjoyable than ever. While I could certainly enlist my family to help — which I often did — what I really wanted was to love cooking again.

I also needed to get my kitchen groove back because it was starting to affect my work. The pandemic was actually a boom time for recipe developers like me: Everyone was cooking more at home and needed recipes that would inspire them or replicate the restaurant dishes they craved. During the first few weeks of the pandemic, I constantly updated my website and received more engagement than ever before. I was happy to be able to help my readers, even in a small way, during a difficult time. But as the weeks turned into months and my enthusiasm waned, I posted less and less and eventually abandoned the successful food blog I had maintained for over eight years.

I found the real solution, albeit unintentionally, on TikTok. It was both counterintuitive and perfectly logical. At my kids’ request, I started making homemade versions of their favorite food trends from the app. I tried first quesabirria. It was a two-day process to braise the beef and prepare the consommé, but the result was an appetizing and delicious meal that really impressed my kids. Then he gets fed up with their cravings for sugary cereal, homemade cookies cerealThis involved cutting out hundreds of tiny sugar cookies using the underside, the round part, of a cake decorating tip. It was time consuming, hectic and ridiculous, but most of all it was fun. (Though I only let them have it for dessert, not for breakfast.)

I slowly realized that the solution to staying passionate about cooking wasn’t quick and easy recipes, meal prep, meal delivery kits, or any other trend that would minimize time spent cooking. (And it wasn’t really TikTok either.) The end to my cooking burnout was cooking more and cooking with intention. I needed this to be different from the everyday dinner mess. I needed to make time for ambitious and tactile projects that inspired me.

I had to reframe cooking as a creative expression rather than a chore. Kubinka notes that “engaging in the creative process stimulates the right side of the brain, which controls your emotions, intuition, and imagination, and can make what feels like a chore more fun and enjoyable.” Kubinka also suggests that cooks struggling with burnout should “slow down and pay attention to how you prepare the food and how it makes you feel.” Changing your pace and awareness in the kitchen “can help change your relationship with cooking and allow you to notice things you might not see when you’re rushing.”

Mindful cooking also means using our hands, like kneading dough or crushing spices. “What is often lost in burnout is our connection to our own body. By incorporating awareness, we get off autopilot and come back to our bodies,” says Kubinka.

Elaborate meal plans aren’t always realistic on busy weeknights. The important thing is to find the time to do it right, just as you would find time for any beloved hobby – to do it mindfully. Close the kitchen door. Minimize distractions. Give yourself permission to do something extremely cumbersome.

Need a challenging project to help you get your cooking excitement back? Food & Wine has lots of hands-on project-based recipes to inspire you to express your creativity in the kitchen. Not to mention how impressed your friends and family will be!

• Discover fermentation by doing it ethiopian injection or south indian dosa.
• Did you miss this sourdough craze During COVID? It’s not too late to start.
• Maybe you’ve always dreamed of learning how to make laminated pastries. croissants — the ultimate test of the home baker.

Or make something you usually buy from scratch pickle, hot sauceor cereal. You’ll be amazed at how accomplished you’ll feel.