5 strategies to make imaginative, delicious and nutritious home-cooked meals

Cooking fatigue can go beyond being in a rut and turn into total cooking burnout.

Do you ever get tired of cooking and eating the same thing? It’s easy to fall into a food rut, eating the same few meals on repeat. Daily meal planning, particularly for busy folks and parents with hectic schedules, can lead to decision fatigue and burnout. However, healthy eating doesn’t have to be boring, bland or repetitive. Plus, eating a wider variety of foods is better for nutrition, helping to prevent nutrient deficiencies and boost energy.

Here are some strategies to make imaginative and delicious home-cooked meals that are anything but boring.

1. Try out new recipes

Whether you reach for a cookbook or search up food blogs, trying out new recipes is a sure way to spice up your meal planning. Some unique recipe types to consider include sheet pan meals, slow cooker dishes, hearty grain bowls and mason jar salads. These recipes all cater to healthy meal planning and can be useful for easy make-ahead meals and batch-cooking ingredients for the week.

2. Shop the farmers market

While it’s OK to have favorite foods, sticking to the basics can get in the way of trying new foods and experimenting. Visiting the local farmers is an excellent way to explore unfamiliar fruit and veggies while supporting local farms. Try adding new vegetables into a staple meal. For example, if you usually make green beans and rice alongside chicken, change it up with Japanese sweet potatoes and eggplant to pair with your chicken instead.

3. Explore culinary resources

There is a plethora of high-quality cooking resources available via various media sources to help inspire meal planning. Food magazines, newspaper food sections and television cooking shows and documentaries, to name a few, offer more than just recipes including unique ingredients, creative cooking methods, inspiring food stories and more. Taking a local cooking class is another way to build your cooking repertoire and learn cooking skills first hand from trained chefs.

4. Join the club

Most likely you are not the only one tired of eating the same old thing. For some folks, cooking can feel like a necessary evil that is more enjoyable with company. Consider engaging others in your community to create a sort of cooking club. Ask friends, family, coworkers, neighbors or other parents at your children’s school, for example, if they would like to form a supper club, soup club or meal planning group. One approach is to cook or bake together. Another option is for each club member to cook a large batch of one recipe and share portions with others in the group. This way everyone goes home with a variety of new meals to enjoy.

5. Know when you need more support

Cooking fatigue can go beyond being in a rut and turn into total cooking burnout. Of course, mental health concerns and life stress can also interfere with the multi-step tasks involved in making meals. Taking a step back and giving yourself a break can help reinvigorate your cooking routine. Convenience and frozen products, meal delivery kits and home-delivered groceries are some tools that can reduce the burden of planning meals and cooking.

Reach out to a medical or mental health professional for help if burnout makes self-care tasks feel too overwhelming for an extended period of time.

LeeAnn Weintraub, MPH, RD is a registered dietitian, providing nutrition counseling and consulting to individuals, families and organizations. She can be reached by email at RD@halfacup.com.