So I have this problem... I enjoy cooking and when my grandmother passed away, I inherited her recipe book and her Le Creuset dutch oven.

THEN I discovered I lived a short drive from a Le Creuset outlet store AND they have a mailing list that regularly delivers 30% to 70% off coupon deals.

So I'll find a pan that makes me go "Oooh!" then I look for excuses to use it.

So it's not really a lack of motivation, but rather I want people to cook for. Cooking just for me? Incredibly lazy. "More time to make and clean up than eat? I'm not making it." Cooking for OTHER people?

Chuck roast:

Shakshuka:

Chocolate hazelnut chocolate chip cheesecake:

Beef roast:

Pork loin w/ scalloped potatoes:

Ableskievers:

Chicken Biryani. I keep getting the ingredients and making simpler things.

Croissant

Beef Wellington.

Croissants - 3 days prep time minimum? You have to be very precise with everything and it's just such a bother.

Beef Wellington

Billionaire

Gonna take a detour here and mention the time that I tried to make tofu from scratch, starting with making soy milk from dried beans that I'd ordered just for the task:

The soy milk turned out surprisingly well, with the help of a semi-automated device, but I realised on the spot that most commercial soy milk has a tonne of sugar added to it, and I didn't want to go down that route. In fact, it just about turned me off of soy milk permanently.

Anyway, I moved on to the tofu-making stage, and realised that both coagulants I tested (lemon juice and nigari powder) imparted a huge, unwanted taste to the tofu, on top of neither being all that great at coagulating the soy milk. In the end, I think I could have improved on this cooking disaster, but my motivation was gone at that point, and I wanted to move on.

There's also the fact that no matter what a versatile food tofu is, it's also a significantly processed one, and I wanted to move in the opposite direction. That said, I understand that fresh-made tofu in Japan and other places can be incredibly tasty, almost worth wolfing down straight with no cooking or spices.

Croissants. Tasty and pretty, but a ridiculous amount of fiddly work with all the rolling and folding.

Ditto puff pastry from scratch.

All food is like that to me. I only cook because otherwise I'd die of starvation. I eat to live - food has always just been fuel for me. I don't want to put any more effort into cooking than what is absolutely necessary. If money was not an issue, then personal chef would be the first person I'd hire. Hell, if it was possible I'd hire someone to eat it for me too.

Lasagne. And I hate Mondays.

Sourdough

Papa reyeñas(sp?). They're so good, it's basically mashed potatoes with ground beef mix inside, then fried/seared and baked until it sorta looks like a potato again. Then you take finely sliced red onions and soak them in lime juice for 12 hours so they get less harsh and use it like a topping

Honestly, I know how to do all off the top of my head except how long to boil the potatoes...I just would never put that much effort into my meals, so I would need a reason to cook it for others. There's also a lot of cleanup, you need a frying pan you need a frying pan you wash twice, a big bowl, a masher, an oven dish, a lime squeezer, Tupperware (or a ziplock, but I get enough plastic), a knife, a spatula, and whatever serving dishes

I don't enjoy cooking, but I'm pretty good at it when I want to be... But I have to want to be

Doughnuts. I made doughnuts by hand recently, and kneading the dough. For. 30. Minutes. By. Hand. Fuck, never again. I usually don't mind kneading dough by hand, but this was the first time I wish I had a mashine for it

Ramen. Like true, 14+ hrs of effort tonkotsu broth.

It's been a dream of mine for a long time, but fuck is that a long time.

Century egg

I have made some fussy dishes, including sourdough puff pastry. I'm pretty motivated to make food homemade.

Baklava is the one I'd like to make but never will, even if I bought the dough - layering phyllo sheets one by one would kill me.

Homemade pizza. Making the dough creates a mess and requires delicate manual labor in several steps at precise times over more than 24 hours. Looks great on YouTube but that's just not me.

Edit: thanks for the suggestions, guys. Who knows, maybe one day... 😉

I don't really lack for motivation, I'll take on some pretty wild culinary adventures, but occasionally I run into things that I just can't logistically make happen.

For example, nowhere in my house has the right sort of temperature/humidity to cure my own salami and such (I've checked,) and I just don't have the space to squeeze in another fridge with humidity controls and such to make a curing chamber.

I've made my own bacon, various kinds of sausages (including smoking my own kielbasa, andouille, and hot dogs) I've helped butcher chickens, I've made beef Wellington, sushi, I've baked bread and cakes in a Dutch oven in a fire pit, I've made ice cream, homemade pierogies.

Proper paella. I enjoy making it in the sense that it's simpler to cook and is more like a risotto, but to make an actual paella as close to the way the dish should be made takes so much effort, the correct ingredients and equipment I have neither the time nor the money for.

Lamb Vindaloo.

God I wanna be good at making that. And veggie samosas

I have the Ladurée macaron cookbook and I look at it frequently, and then go buy a lesser version of the cookie and pretend I’m happy.

As much as I love barbecue I don't and won't own a smoker.

https://www.kitchentreaty.com/...

I made it once for Thanksgiving years ago. Everyone loved it. It was a pain. Especially since I didn't have an immersion blender.

Mianjin (seitan) or vegan ramen. Both super time consuming and hard but awesome!

The only reason i do any cooking at all is because it's too expensive to buy food.
I hate cooking. It takes so much effort.

Khao soi

My mom makes these cottege cheese and bread crumbs dumplings that she boils until they float and then you cut them in half and drizzle melted butter and brown sugar on them.

I could never pronounce or spell the name of the dish but she claims it's a traditional German dessert.

I tried explain it to chat gpt and it had no clue what the hell I was talking about. It kept telling me about Turkish dishes that have the right ingredients but look nothing like the baseball sized dumplings she would make.

Spring rolls. They are so much work. If you wanna do them right you have to start the night before. So many ingredients, the sauce. But they're soooo good.

Pavlova.

Working in the kitchen requires good coordination and an intuition I will never have in my current setting because it's not the form of intuition I was raised on. The ability to cook to precision without everything spelled out comes off to me as almost psychic, and I don't have that. So I will never be making myself my favorite dish.

Soup dumplings. The broth for the soup has to be make in a specific way to solidify and I think there's also a complex method of incorporating the soup into the meat and veggies in the dumplings. It's just a very time consuming process all around. It's sucks tho because I love soup dumplings and being able to make a huge portion of them would be amazing.

Ice cream

Ramen, but it takes so God damn long to make.

Tofu.

Pressing the water out, marinating for hours, then cooking properly so it's delicious and not a rubbery mess is just too much hassle.

Sourdough

mainly foods that have a key ingredient that I would only use for that dish and not very often. an example being something that needs a cup of flour. can't buy a cup of flour, gotta buy the whole goddamn 3 pounds.

I once made borscht. That is a labour of love I'll never go through again. I also made a hot chocolate layer cake, including making the marshmallows, and that was a lot of work.

Cubanos. I want to really, really bad. But I know I will never go through that.

I live in a different city and often find myself wishing for my mother's Portuguese Salted Cod Casserole. It was out typical sunday family dinner when I still lived in the same city as them. Not a cultural tradition, just because it was my favourite dish.

But the nature of it ensures that I'll never ever ever have the patience to do it myself, considering that step one is soaking the dried salted cod in cold water that you repeatedly replace for up to 48 hours in order to get the salt out.

Demiglace. Way too much work.

I'd love go make chana masala, my favorite indian dish. but it just takes too long to make...

protip : you can cook anything. maybe you don't cook it well the first time. but if you're not completely freeballin it, and are following an established well reviewed recipe, once you cook it poorly or not to your taste, you can always make notes, and adjust the next time. be fearless in your experiments, there's a lot of freedom (and cost savings) in learning how to cook what you like to eat, the way you like to eat it, at home.

I like to do a bunch of baking for the holidays, and usually do a mix of easy/familiar recipes, plus some new/challenging recipes. I made caramels, and while I was pretty happy with them, I never heard one person comment on them, and they were a lot of effort compared to things like chocolate chip cookies, so I've never made them again.

Edit: Another is pumpkin pie from fresh pumpkins. I've done it, it's not that difficult, but it's also not any cheaper or better tasting than just buying good canned pumpkin.

Cake. Orange cake.

Most of them. They require not only the right ingredients and even the right brands. But the amount of tools you would have to go out and get, just to make that thing. I currently am struggling to make homemade butterbeer, from harry potter, because I spent like a combined $30+ in materials and ingredients and that's only by one recipe. Which is another thing, recipes vary and have their own way of doing things which again is going to require having to spend more just to make it.

It's a no-brainer why people would rather have take out or go out to restaurants.