Hi, I’m Lisa
Welcome to Burnt Out Cooking!
Does it feel like you’ve been cooking for 100 years? Is figuring out what to eat every single day exhausting? You are not alone! In fact, I think we’re in the majority. This blog was created to help ease that burden for me and for you.
A little background about me and how this blog came about.
After I left my corporate job in early 2024 I took several months to decompress and then started to think about what I was going to do next. I started looking into blogging because I really love writing, data, and learning new technology, but most importantly I could do it on my own. The big question though was what would I write about. I’ve always been a planner and organizer so I was toying with that idea but not sure how that would work. About that same time I was also doing a deep dive into our expenses for the first half of the year and was shocked to see how much we were spending eating out. I should not have been surprised, given how we had fallen into the habit of going out or getting carry-out whenever we just didn’t feel like cooking. Once we were empty nesters, and I guess didn’t feel so obligated to feed our kids, it became SO HARD to cook every night. I had always loved cooking but after 40 years of it I was burnt out! It wasn’t sustainable for our budget or our health to keep going out all the time so I knew I needed to figure out how to make eating at home as easy as possible. And that’s where the idea for this blog came from. If I was going down this path for myself, I figured I could also use it as an opportunity to help others. I’ve talked to numerous women around my age and every one of them is burnt out on cooking at this point in their lives!
My goal is to provide tools, tips, tricks, recipes, ideas, plans and guidance for you to get mostly healthy meals on the table with the least amount of time and effort. To me, this means minimizing the amount of chopping, measuring, ingredients and equipment used. Some of the recipes and meal ideas will be very healthy and some will be less so. Overall, I try to keep the amount of processed food we eat to a minimum but sometimes that’s the best option for that night. As long as we have an overall healthy diet, I don’t worry much about having frozen pizza once in a while. I also am not striving for perfection or the best dish ever made with these ideas or recipes. My mantra is “good enough, not gourmet”! Are frozen garlic cubes as good as fresh? Nope. But they’re good enough most of the time and you don’t have to peel or chop them.
The focus will be cooking for one or two adults and the target audience is people who have experience cooking and can make adjustments and decisions as needed based on their own experience. Many of the ideas aren’t even recipes, they’re ideas for combining a handful of ingredients to make a meal. Since the primary focus is on minimizing the time and effort needed to get a meal on the table, it’s not really a budget food blog. Some of the timesaving tips and ideas will be slightly more expensive than buying the raw ingredients and doing it yourself. However, using those timesavers is still less expensive than eating out and I’ll have other tips to help you save money when cooking at home (i.e. plan your menu around the sales!).
This is a journey and the blog will change and expand as I connect and get feedback from my community. I would love to hear from you! You can connect with me on Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest or you can email me directly at: [email protected]