How TikTok Helped Me Get Over Cooking Burnout

If you are reading Food & Wine, chances are that you, like me, enjoy cooking. For most of my adult life, I didn’t just enjoy cooking — I loved it. In my twenties, I hosted elaborate Passover seders and cocktail parties in my tiny, dishwasher-less apartment. I made special trips on weeknights to the fishmonger or Asian market to pick up an ingredient for dinner. In fact, I was so passionate about food and cooking that I abandoned my career as a lawyer for the far-less-lucrative world of food writing and recipe development. 

Even after I had kids — one with multiple food allergies, the other a notoriously picky eater — I continued to love cooking. And that was true even when cooking for my family came on top of my responsibilities as a food writer. All that changed when the pandemic hit.

Like it did for so many, the pandemic broke something in me. There were four people in the house wanting to eat all day every day. Going to the grocery store felt like taking my life in my hands. And taking a break from the kitchen and going out to a restaurant wasn’t an option. Sure, we could order takeout, but that filled me with anxiety: was I supposed to wipe down all the packaging like my neighbors advised? Was I supporting the restaurant industry or exploiting the low-wage workers who didn’t have the luxury of staying home as I did? 

As the months passed, the constant cooking started to feel like a joyless, Sisyphean chore. I grew exhausted and resentful. At my worst, I found myself yelling at my daughter for eating leftover rice — the last rice in the house — that I had been saving for her brother. 

In short, I was burnt out. We casually throw around the term “burnout,”  but it actually has a precise meaning. Agata Kubinska, a Chicago-based psychotherapist, defines burnout as “mental, emotional, and physical depletion that happens over time as a result of having to do something that drains you of your energies and not taking the time to refill your tank.” A loss of pleasure in activities that one used to enjoy is among the first signs of burnout, says Kubinska.

When Food & Wine editor in chief Hunter Lewis wrote about feeling burnt out in March 2021, the thick of the pandemic, throngs of readers responded; in that difficult time, everyone seemed to like the idea of cooking, but not the actual practice (or the dishes that came after).

Even without the added stress of a pandemic, it is easy to see how cooking burnout can happen. Kubinska points out that if “the main cook in the family is one person, [he or she] may feel solely responsible for having to take care of their family’s nutritional needs.” This is a huge and important task, one that adds significantly to a person’s “mental load,” an increasingly popular term used to describe “the cognitive and emotional effort it takes to manage a household,” Kubinska says. “This invisible mental and emotional effort over time can feel depleting, especially if there are picky eaters, various diets and allergies to keep in mind when meal planning.” 

That was me. I was depleted and I did not know how to refill my tank — but my family still had to eat. My first instinct was to try and make cooking easier. During the pandemic, Lewis found it helpful to lean on easier recipes, go back to the basics and longtime favorite recipes, and add a fun new condiment or two to the pot and the table to make things interesting. That stance made sense, and has a lot of weight behind it. Indeed, food media constantly promises new ways to make dinner easier, quicker, 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 how we cook and eat.

I tried all of those solutions and more, yet none actually addressed my problem. Streamlining meal preparation and taking shortcuts meant that I spent less time cooking — and I still resented the time I spent doing it. Cooking became less enjoyable than ever. While I certainly could have enlisted my family to help - and I often did -  what I really wanted was to love cooking again.

I also needed to get my kitchen mojo back because it was starting to impact my work. The pandemic was actually a boom time for recipe developers like me: Everyone was cooking at home more and needed recipes to inspire them, or to replicate the restaurant foods they craved. During the first few weeks of the pandemic, I updated my website constantly and had more engagement than ever. I felt gratified to be helping my readers in some small way during a difficult time. As the weeks turned to months, however, and my enthusiasm waned, I posted less and less until eventually I just abandoned a thriving food blog that I had maintained for over eight years.

I found the real fix without meaning to — on TikTok. It was both counterintuitive and yet also made perfect sense. At my kids’ request, I started making homemade versions of their favorite food trends from the app. First, I tried quesabirria. Stewing the beef and making the consommé was a two-day process, but the result was a savory, delicious meal that genuinely impressed my kids. Then, fed up with their requests for sugary cereal, I made homemade cookie cereal, which involved cutting out hundreds of tiny sugar cookies using the underside, i.e., the round part, of a cake decorating tip. It was time-consuming and fussy and ridiculous but, most of all, it was fun. (Although I only let them eat it for dessert, not breakfast.)

It slowly dawned on me that the solution to staying passionate about cooking was not quick and easy recipes, meal prepping, delivery meal kits, or any other trend designed to minimize the time spent cooking. (And it wasn’t really TikTok either.) The end of my cooking burnout lay in cooking more, and cooking with intention. I needed it to be distinct from the daily dinner scramble. And I needed to carve out time for the kind of ambitious and tactile projects that inspired me. 

I had to reframe cooking as creative expression, not as chore. Kubinka points out that “engaging in the creative process stimulate[s] 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 be mindful with how you prepare food and how it makes you feel.” Changing your speed and awareness in the kitchen “can help change [your] relationship with cooking and allow you to notice things about it that were not available to you when you rush through it.” 

Cooking mindfully also means using our hands, like to knead dough or pound spices. “With burnout, what often gets lost is our connection to our own body. By incorporating mindfulness we are…getting out of autopilot and back into our bodies,” says Kubinka.

Elaborate meal plans are not always realistic on busy weeknights.The key is to find the time to do it right — to do it mindfully — as you’d find the time for any cherished hobby. Close the kitchen door. Minimize distractions. Give yourself permission to make something desperately impractical. 

Do you need a challenging project to help you reclaim your cooking mojo? Food & Wine has a plethora of hands-on recipes-as-projects that will inspire you to express your creativity in the kitchen. To say nothing of how impressed your friends and family will be!

• Explore fermentation by making Ethiopian injera or south Indian dosa. 
• Did you miss out on the sourdough craze during COVID? It’s not too late to start. 
• Perhaps you have always dreamed of learning how to make laminated pastries like croissants — the ultimate test of the home baker. 

Or make something from scratch that you usually buy, be it pickles, hot sauce, or granola. You will be amazed by how accomplished you’ll feel.