How I Got Stuck Cooking the Same Five Meals (and Found My Way Out)

If you’d told me ten years ago that I’d someday find myself bored by cooking, I wouldn’t have believed you. Food has always been my creative outlet, my love language, my playground. I was the kind of person who brought handmade pierogi to potlucks, who owned more kinds of vinegar than shoes, who asked for cookbooks for Christmas. I prided myself on always having a new recipe in the works, some bubbling stock or foraged ingredient ready to be transformed.

And yet, sometime after I became a mom, I realized I was making the same five meals over and over again.

It snuck up on me. There wasn’t a dramatic moment of collapse in the grocery store or a teary confession to a friend. Just a quiet Tuesday night, cooking pasta with red sauce again, when I felt it. The spark was gone. I wasn’t experimenting anymore. I wasn’t even choosing recipes so much as defaulting to muscle memory.

It felt a little like betrayal. Isn’t this supposed to be my thing? Do real foodies get meal ruts?

Turns out, yes. Especially when they become parents.

Motherhood rearranges your internal furniture. It doesn’t matter how much you loved cooking before—after enough nights of being needed and needed and needed until you’re just a husk scraping mashed sweet potato off the floor, the idea of getting creative in the kitchen starts to feel… laughable.

But the thing about food ruts is that they’re rarely about the food. They’re about capacity. About time, energy, attention, and decision fatigue. My culinary “writer’s block” wasn’t a failure of imagination; it was a system overload. I just didn’t have the bandwidth to plan or explore.

That was the moment I first stumbled into meal planning. Initially these were the rigid, colour-coded binder sort— that ended up actually costing us money because we never used all the ingredients before their expired, our food waste went up – but at least I was cooking again. I immediately saw the benefit of meal planning and what it could do for us so I started jotting down loose ideas for the week and playing around with strategies to keep the waste down and the costs within our budget. Swapping one or two meals for something that felt more familiar. Making soup in double batches so I had leftovers. Building in snack dinners, breakfast-for-dinner, and other low-effort wins.

Something shifted. Having a plan freed up just enough mental space to invite creativity back in. Not every night—sometimes dinner still looked like scrambled eggs and toast—but enough that I felt like myself again.

Here’s what I’ve learned since:

1. Meal ruts are normal.

They’re not a sign that you’re failing, or that you don’t love food enough. They’re a sign that something else is taking priority right now—and that’s okay. Life has seasons. Cooking does too.

2. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

You just need a nudge. Sometimes one new recipe is enough to start a domino effect. Or one fresh ingredient—like a bunch of asparagus or a tin of smoked herring. Don’t underestimate the power of small shifts.

3. Systems support spontaneity.

This was the biggest surprise for me. I used to think planning would box me in. But what it actually did was give me a scaffold to hang inspiration on. When I knew I was making soup on Thursday, I could get excited about what kind of soup.

4. Food is allowed to be easy.

Not every meal has to be a masterpiece. Some of the best family dinners are the simplest ones. A tray of roasted sausages and vegetables. A pile of egg noodles with sour cream and bacon. Your energy is a finite resource—spend it where it counts.

So if you’re standing in your kitchen right now, staring blankly into the fridge and wondering how someone who loves food can feel so uninspired, know this: you’re not broken. You’re just in a rut. And you won’t be here forever.

Start small. Pick one new thing to try this week. Maybe it’s a new recipe. Maybe it’s making a weekly meal plan. Maybe it’s just cooking dinner with a podcast in your ears and a glass of wine in your hand.

Because the truth is, you haven’t lost your spark. It’s just buried under a pile of laundry and Cheerios. And when you’re ready, meal planning might just be the compass that helps you find it again.