It Is Not Always the Deciding That Is Hard
Most advice about dinner assumes the hard part is deciding.
A lot of the time it is.
But more than one of you has written to me about something else, and it is the half nobody puts in an article.
Some evenings the deciding is fine.
You know exactly what you want to eat.
It is the standing, the reaching, the lifting, the twenty minutes on your feet at the end of a day that already used them up.
That is a different problem, and it does not get solved by a better meal plan.
I should be honest with you about where I am standing.
I walk close to ten kilometers most days, so this is not something I am living every evening.
What I do know is the evening when the answer is simply no.
I cooked only for myself for fifteen years after my children moved out, and for a lot of those years I gave my own dinner almost no attention at all.
Something quick, standing up, and on with the evening.
Seven Ways to Let the Kitchen Do More of the Work
None of these ask you to do more.
They all move the work off you and onto the kitchen.
They are roughly in order of how much difference they make for the least effort, so if you only try one, try the first.
1. Sit Down to Do the Prep
This is the one I wish somebody had said out loud years ago.
There is no rule that says vegetables have to be chopped standing at a counter.
Bring the board and the bowl to the kitchen table and sit down.
A tall stool works too, if you would rather stay at counter height.
Almost all the standing in cooking is prep, not cooking.
Take that part sitting and you have cut the hardest half of the job before you have turned on a single burner.
Nobody hands out medals for standing up.
2. Keep One Light Pan Where You Can Reach It
A good heavy pan is a lovely thing.
It is also the thing that makes you decide, at half past five, that you cannot be bothered.
So do not get rid of it.
Just make sure it is not the only option.
One light pan, one light saucepan, kept at waist height rather than in the back of a low cupboard, means the easy choice is also the reachable one.
The same goes for everything else you use most.
The things you reach for daily should live between your hips and your shoulders.
Everything you use twice a year can have the awkward shelf.
3. Buy Some of the Work Already Done
There is a strange guilt around this and I would like to talk you out of it.
Pre-chopped onion is the same onion.
Frozen chopped spinach is the same spinach, picked and frozen at its best.
A bag of ready-washed salad is not cheating.
Tinned beans have already been soaked and cooked, which is the whole reason they exist.
If a step in the meal is the step that stops you making it, buy that step.
You are not lowering your standards.
You are removing the one bit that was never the point.
4. One Pan, One Tray, One Bowl
Every extra pan is something else to lift, drain, carry and wash.
A tray in the oven with a piece of fish and some vegetables around it is one lift in and one lift out.
A soup is one pot.
A tin of tuna over a handful of salad leaves is no pot at all.
When you are tired, count the number of times you will have to lift something before you choose the meal.
It is a better test than counting the ingredients.
5. Do the Work When the Energy Is There, Not When the Meal Is
This is not about cooking extra and eating it twice, which I have written about in Cooking for One: Why It Sometimes Feels Harder Than It Should.
It is about the clock.
Most of us have a time of day when we have more in the tank, and for a lot of women that is the morning.
There is nothing that says the chopping has to happen at the same time as the cooking.
Wash and cut the vegetables after breakfast and put them in the fridge.
Cook the grains while you are already in the kitchen for something else.
Then at six o’clock, when you have nothing left, the job that is waiting for you is assembly, not cooking.
Same meal. Different hour.
Completely different amount of effort.
6. Keep Two Meals That Need No Cooking at All
Not a backup plan.
An actual part of the week.
Mine are these two.
Neither needs more than a tin opener.
A tuna and avocado bowl.
Drain a tin of tuna, slice an avocado over a handful of bagged salad leaves or baby spinach, put the tuna on top, and finish it with a splash of soy sauce and a squeeze of lime.
Protein, vegetables and healthy fats, and it takes about as long as opening the tin.
Or a bean salad.
Rinse a tin of beans and toss them with whatever chopped vegetables you have, tomatoes, cucumber and peppers all work well, drizzle with olive oil and a squeeze of lemon, and have it with a slice of whole-grain bread.
Neither needs a hob.
Neither asks you to stand up for more than a minute.
Pick your own two and never run out of what they need.
Then the evening when you cannot face it has an answer that is already in the house.
7. Let the Oven and the Kettle Do the Standing
A slow cooker, an oven tray, a kettle.
All of them do their work without you in the room.
That is the real difference between a pan on the hob and a tray in the oven.
One of them needs you standing next to it.
The other one needs you to open a door twice and then sit down for forty minutes.
If you are choosing between two meals that are equally good, choose the one that does not need watching.
Where I Would Start
With the chair.
Everything else on this list is a change to what you buy or what you own.
The chair costs nothing, needs no shopping, and takes away the single most tiring part of making dinner.
You can do it tonight.
And a plain word before I go: I am not a doctor.
This is about making an ordinary evening easier, and if something in your body is making the kitchen genuinely difficult, your own doctor knows your situation and I do not.
If tonight is one of those evenings, my free Quick Pantry Meal Formula is built for exactly this.
Four parts on a plate, no recipe to follow, and a pantry list so there is always something in the house.
Let’s Talk
What makes cooking hardest for you, on the evenings when it is hard?
Reply and tell me.
read every one, and it is how articles like this one get written.
