Repeat Recipes, New Recipes, Vague Recipes — How Do You Like to Cook?

Here's a bit of a weird question — do you prefer to repeat recipes, mix in new recipes, do vague “DIY” kind of recipes? How do you keep things “fresh” if you're using the same ingredients that everyone agrees are healthy like beans, yogurt, milk, vegetables?

There are no right answers here, obviously!

I used to have a lot of repeat recipes, but I'm… somehow super tired of them all. Even basic, low effort meals like tacos now make me kind of roll my eyes. I try mixing in new recipes but those are high effort and not always great.

At one point I had tried to have a rough theme that repeated for recipes — chicken or fish on Monday, soup on Tuesday, etc — and huge lists of things that might fit each theme.

I also was fond of a “roll for initiative” planner (link to the freebie from Imperfect Inspiration) that I had modified so instead of restaurants, I listed recipes to make instead. Old recipes, new recipes, easy recipes. That one worked the best and I should probably go back to it; it was the easiest way to plan dinner at the last minute. A lot of times dinner is selected by my son who uses an online choice wheel like this one. I should probably get back to the Imperfect Inspiration one instead.

I've also heard about what I'll call “vague” recipes — the Mark Bittman book, VB6, is great for this because the recipes literally list ingredients like “a grain, a bean, a green vegetable” in very rough terms. Then you can adapt based on taste, availability, etc. (The theory in the book is that it isn't hard to be “vegan before 6PM,” which is good for a variety of health, budget, and ethical reasons.)

On the flip side, my parents have a set menu 5 days of the week, repeatedly eating the same simple recipes and only rarely trying new recipes.

So, the question for today — how do you cook? Do you like to repeat the same recipes over and over, or try new ones? (Do you recipes you repeat so often you have them memorized?) Do you prefer to do meal subscription services to “choose” your meals for you? Do you prefer to wing it and do “girl dinner” (or freezer dinner, or cereal dinner)?

(This is actually not that different a question from an old one we had on vacations, where we discussed the pros and cons of repeating vacations versus trying new things.)

Stock photo via Stencil.

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