How to Get Out of a Cooking Rut and Get Excited About Cooking Again

How to get out of a cooking rut isn’t hard when you know how. Whether you’re a working parent who dreads the thought of meal planning for a week, a single person who doesn’t enjoy cooking for one, you’re just too busy, or you’re bored with the same handful of dishes you have on repeat, we’ve got loads of ideas for how to learn to love to cook again.

If you once enjoyed cooking, but these days dread the thought of it – you struggle to make dinner, would rather get take-away, home-delivery, or pack the freezer with ready-meals; or you cook, but barely cook more than the same few dishes, over and over again – then I’ve got loads of suggestions for getting out of that cooking rut and learning to love the kitchen again.

I know all about cooking ruts. I love to cook now, especially for loved ones. Few things give me more pleasure. I grew up with grandmothers who thought nothing of shopping every morning and cooking all day to create delicious comforting meals for their families. Some of my fondest childhood memories are making dumplings with my baboushka and peeling peas with my nanna.

These days, I love to cook so much that some mornings I wake up having dreamt of new dishes. I adore researching food, replicating family dishes and developing new recipes. But then that’s part of what I do for a living. I don’t have to get kids to school, race to get a train, spend a day in an office, and cook dinner soon after I get home. Cooking is part of my day and a very satisfying one.

But it wasn’t always like this. I know about cooking ruts. For many years, I worked a demanding job, went to uni a few nights a week, and for some years I also taught evening courses. When Terence was also going to uni after work, we’d meet in Sydney’s Chinatown for bowls of laksa or bring home take-away noodles, and sometimes head out to a neighbourhood restaurant for a late dinner.

For years, I didn’t cook. After a hectic week and projects on the weekend, the last thing I felt like doing was making meals. Then after we began dining out in Sydney (years before ‘cost-of-living crisis’ became part of everyday conversations!), Terence developed a keen interest in cheffy cooking and was a much better cook than I was.

He’d buy restaurant cookbooks, practice dishes on me until they were perfect, print up menus he’d written for the table, and make multi-course degustation meals for dinner parties we often held, that began with an amuse bouche and ended in dessert. I was very happy to set the table, choose the music, and pour the wine.

These days, I’d happily cook for a dinner party, or spend the day prepping dishes for a family-style feast of the kind my Russian-Ukrainian grandparents’ used to have, where we’d gather around the dining table in the afternoon and we’d still be there well into the evening, sharing stories over food my grandmother had lovingly prepared.

Here’s how to get out of a cooking rut and fall back in love with cooking again. Looking for more cooking inspiration? We have many hundreds of recipes you can browse in our archives, and you can save recipes you like by clicking on the heart on the right of each post to save your favourite recipes and stories in your private account.

How to Get Out of a Cooking Rut and Get Back in the Kitchen Again

You’ll find loads of ideas for how to get out of a cooking rut below.

Browse Cookbooks

There are few things more inspiring for home cooks than a beautiful cookbook with mouthwatering images and fascinating stories, whether, in this cost of living crisis, you borrow the cookbook from the library or treat yourself to a new cookbook.

Try secondhand bookshops for vintage cookbooks. If you’re in Australia, the Rotary bookshops are excellent and your money is going to a good cause. Shopping online? These are some of our favourite cookbooks on Amazon: cookbooks for culinary travellers, James Beard award-winning cookbooks, cookbooks by Australian chefs, classic cookbooks for serious cooks.

Travel Near or Far, Just Travel

Just travel. You don’t have to travel far, although there are few things like a culinary trip abroad to get you excited about food and get the creative cooking juices flowing again. If you identify as a foodie and travel for food, head to a country with a cuisine you love if you can.

Love Italian food? Get to Italy. Fan of Mexican food? Head to Mexico. Devoted to Vietnamese? Go to Vietnam. Eat your way around the country. Sign up for market walks, food tours and cooking classes. If a foreign food adventure doesn’t reignite your passion for cooking, nothing will. (By the way, we love Get Your Guide and EatWith for booking cooking classes, food tours and meals with locals.)

But you shouldn’t have to travel far to expose yourself to cuisines and ingredients new to you, especially if you live in a multicultural country such as Australia, the USA or UK. Visit suburbs with communities and culinary cultures different to your own.

I was scouring Sydney’s western suburbs on Google Maps looking for a Chinese restaurant my family used to eat at almost every week for years. It’s no longer there, but what I discovered was how much the suburb had changed. It’s packed with Korean restaurants. I immediately wanted to go there – and in the meantime had an urge to cook Korean food!

Get to Your Nearest Chinatown

Many big cities around the world have a Chinatown – or Koreatown or Little Italy or Japantown or whatever. The idea is to immerse yourself in a food-driven destination such as a Chinatown for a day or half a day, which is the next best thing to getting on a plane and can be just as inspiring.

Take Sydney’s Chinatown as an example: you could breakfast on a noodle soup or yum cha; lunch on regional Chinese, from Sichuan to Cantonese, or Malaysian, Singaporean, Taiwanese, etc; snack on Chinese buns or sip bubble tea.

You can punctuate bites, meals and beverages shopping Paddy’s Markets for fresh produce, browsing the Asian supermarkets for ingredients, ceramics and kitchen tools, or strolling the nearby Chinese Garden of Friendship to work up an appetite.

Shop the Markets

Local markets are my happy place. After my husband and cat, one of the things I’ve missed most during my time in Australia this year have been Siem Reap’s local markets – the colour, the smells, the flavours, the action, and the friendly smiling faces.

There’s nothing like a Southeast Asian market for a glorious assault upon the senses. Even after living in the region for 15 years, we’re still learning about the food, and discovering ingredients we haven’t seen before, and our first response is usually: what do cooks do with that, how is it eaten, how can we cook with it?!

Beautiful fresh produce and ingredients, especially fragrant herbs and spices, get me excited about the prospect of cooking. And while it’s hard to beat markets in Asia – and the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America, especially Mexico – I bet you’ve got a great market near you.

The nearest rural city to me has a farmer’s market, while Melbourne, a train ride away, has myriad markets, where you’ll find everything from wonderful fresh seafood and stall-holders specialising in ingredients, from mushrooms to potatoes, as well as small specialist shops: from butcheries to cheesemongers.

Do a Cooking Class

Signing up for a cooking class is another quick way to get out of a cooking rut and get your cooking groove back – especially if you’ll be learning to cook dishes from a cuisine that’s new to you, a cuisine you know and love but don’t cook much, or a food that you do cook but would love to master or at the very least cook better.

Hands-on cooking classes are best if you want to come away with new skills and you’re the kind of person who learns best by doing. But if you’re not up for hands-on lessons after a hectic week at work, get along to a cooking demonstration that you can watch with a glass of wine in hand.

Attend a Food Festival or Writers Festival

Food festivals are fantastic for getting inspired and excited about food and cooking again. You can watch cooking demos, join culinary workshops, get hands-on in cooking classes, listen to talks by chefs and cookbook authors, and taste food from around the world.

I recently attended a handful of sessions at a writer’s festival, which were presented by cookbook authors, chefs, a forager-cum-herbalist, a restaurant critic turned farmer, and a farmer-cum-author, and it was one of the most best things I’ve done in a long time.

The sessions were not only inspiring and had me wanting to cook cuisines I don’t cook nearly often enough, such as Greek food, and to cook with new ingredients, such as native foods, but they were intellectually stimulating and had me thinking about everything from regenerative farming to indigenous cuisine.

All I wanted to do was get back home and get in the kitchen and get cooking!

If you have any ideas for how to get out of a cooking rut we’d love to hear from you in the comments below.