I have pretty severe ADD, no H though. I LOVE cooking, provided I am not cooking for just myself. The key I have found is prep. Make sure you have everything chopped and measured before you throw anything into the pan. Also PREHEAT your damn pans and ovens! If you are data driven the way I am, set a timer and figure out how long it takes to preheat the oven. Your pan shouldn’t take more than 30-45 seconds to preheat. Once everything is chopped and assembled, I turn on the heat, and start to dance.

The dance is a chaotic mix of tossing stuff into the pan, stirring or tossing stuff in the pan, and washing the dishes I have used. Past that, it is literally just practice. The more time you spend in a kitchen the more innate your sense of time will become. I barely need to set timers anymore. I still do, just in case I get absorbed in something else, but frequently I look up at my time with about 00:03 on the clock.

That depends. You have to identify what your particular hang up(s) are. Is it the actual cooking, not knowing what you’re doing, textures of things, prep, clean up, having multiple tasks going at once etc.?

Once you identify the hangup you can work with it. For me personally it’s mostly time and cleanup. I don’t enjoy cooking so it feels like I’m wasting time I could be using for anything else. Then I have to clean up after? Fuck that!

So I try to stick to easy, short, less dishes involved meals. The Instant pot is nice because it speeds a lot of things up, I can set it and walk away. Air fryer is great too. I line mine with tin foil so I have to clean it less.

I also work with my ADHD. I’ll buy frozen veggies and stuff because 90% of the time the extra step to prep/cut things is the step that prevents me from doing anything.

Do a weeks worth of meal planning and prep once a week. Do it while relaxed and listening to a good podcast or having your favourite movie running. Make it enjoyable (or at least as stress free as possible). For the rest of the week it’s just plop and cook, plop and cook with very little thought required. Good luck!

Learn how to make 2 meals. Make massive portions of said meals.

I made it more fun by using a nice sharp kitchen knife. Not that I cook more now, but I can! If my wife asks me in advance to cook

I do two setup foods. Two steps, food is done.

I love cooking and I was thinking about why the other day. Turns out it’s one of the few things that when I start I will actually finish. Whether it ends up good or not is another thing.

Might not be the most adhd compatible tip, but I try to clean up the kitchen after cooking. If I need to do it before cooking I find it drains a lot of energy

I’m not diagnosed but based on most of the posts that end on /all I’m suspecting I’m somewhere along the adhd line or whatever.

what makes me love cooking is that I can split large recipes in small sub tasks. I’m using a ton of small bowls to prep each part in and organize my kitchen.

Each of those little steps is in itself a small emergency that must be dealt with instead of multiple recipes for a meal.

Eventually all goes in together in a beautifully organised ceremony of sorts when it’s time to finish the recipes.

And second to that I can iterate a meticulously improve the outcome. And who doesn’t love to track progress with pics and such?

I have adhd but love cooking. What I do, is make it rule-free, chaotic, and kind of like the other creative things my hyperfocus and natural interest kind of steer me to anyway.

So I don’t follow recipes; for new things, I experiment and kind of freestyle stuff, fail and learn, then over time I accumulate enough to understand why things happen and eventually when the fundamentals are kind of all “clicked”, it’s extremely fun to just apply them in different ways in practice.

I also love baking for the same reason.

But perhaps that only works because it’s very similar to my other interests like music, creative writing and programming. As in, creative, something to work within the bounds of rules that exist, without knowing them, and accumulating understanding through exploration which is always so exciting and can easily slurp up hours of each day in an eyeblink.

But probably worth a test to try and frame it like this! I know it works for me and I have a pretty severe case of adhd, even fully medicated

Edit: also, reading the other suggestions here, I realized there’s another thing I do: I never do the one thing. When I start cooking, I always take it as the one chance to do all the things I’ve been wanting to do, because it’s just easy when I’m already making a mess and piles of dishes and all.

I, same as most everyone, hate waiting around. So I never do; I just have several things going so I can always jump from one thing to the other and then to the other etc. so I never have to stop. It’s the natural way I work with software too and pretty much anything in my life, and most adhd peeps I know through support groups or otherwise have the same “superpower” (ugh).

So it helps for me to have a lot on my hands so I never have to think or stop and can just jump around doing many things. Start hydrating a sourdough base from the starter, then feed it, while those sit, start on a dessert by doing caramel/toffee, and as that sits, check up on and start kneading in flours to the bread, and once that sits again, start stirring the caramel, then put out of heat once ready, then feed the starter second time, knead the bread again, then start working the granulated soy to mimic ground beef (I’ve found egg whites and vegan butter at room temp, and slowly working those in while letting it soak them and spices works so well), then once that sits, and bread still has to rise, and can’t feed the starter yet to put it to fridge, I start packaging the caramel (good idea to do more than you think you’d need, so that allows something more next time more easily), then was a couple of dishes (so never try to do all at once, it’s so annoying and boring), then knead the bread, then feed the starter and fridge it, then continue working in the “ground beef-ish soy”, then pour a pile of flour on the same table already messy from kneading, break an egg or two, start making fresh pasta, and so on and so on… it’s a nice all-consuming flow with a lot of varying stuff to shuffle between and dance around, keeps me very occupied and I usually watch a tv series at the same time or listen to ebook

When I lived with a partner I we would usually make some bigger meals on the weekend and I would do most of the work, but she would help here and there to make it a bit interactive and thus more “interesting” from an ADHD perspective. That would be good for various meals through the week. Doing it together made it easier for me. She would then help to fill in the gaps. Still more burden on her than me for that particular task. But we balanced that out with other tasks.

When you have a partner who doesn’t mind doing the some of the stuff you can’t get your brain to allow you to do and then you do the things they aren’t good at or don’t like to do, it helps. IMHO you don’t have to split each task evenly to make it fair as long you do different tasks that require a relatively equal amount of effort for the person doing it. Also, taking into consideration specialty tasks that would otherwise require hiring someone. Like I was able to do electrical work, computer repair, and some home repairs that she wouldn’t even be able to touch, for example. Those took a lot of time and effort and saved either time and effort or money. That should be considered when thinking about equitably splitting chores.

We also didn’t have the problem of gender role based task discrimination. Not sure if that’s something you need to deal with, but neither of us were men and both didn’t really prescribe to a gender role basis for types of chores, so there weren’t really those tasks that one of us felt should be done by the other gender and thus not counted as chores to be split. Everything was on the table for equitable splitting.

Now that I live alone, it’s a little more difficult, and I’m not good at cooking for myself, but at least it only affects me, not my current partner. So getting stuff for quick sandwiches for days I don’t have the spoons is fine, but you can’t expect a partner to make those sacrifices.

for me, it’s always been about reducing steps. possibilities can be mixed and matched:

• starting from grocery shopping stage, choose more items that are partially or fully cooked. can be main protein/carbs like frozen chicken patties, sliced bread, or it can be side dishes like pickled vegetables.
• also for raw ingredients, choose items that are pre-chopped or pre-sliced. Asian supermarkets have thin sliced meat intended for hotpot but they’re also great sautéed or stir fried and Cook thoroughly in SECONDS. same goes for hotpot veggies.
• many saucy dishes have condensed base version in jars. Japanese curry(non-spicy available) is sold in dry blocks that only require water and heat to become a rich comforting stew-like sauce. i also recommend Japanese blocks of “hayashi” sauce (beef & mushroom flavored thick sauce) and “cream stew”(can be used as a white gravy). these can even be used as pasta sauce. Italian style pasta sauce is also great. don’t have to use with pasta. Cook it with protein and/or veggies then just add any carb when serving.
• traditional processed foods are great! not ultra processed foods, think sausage, meatballs, tofu, cheese, dumplings (gyoza, pot stickers, dim sum), pickled veggies, etc. these examples usually only need minimal cooking/reheating if any. if there is a Korean market within range, they often sell giant jars of kimchi (even non-spicy) which may be enough to serve as main veggies for several meals (pickled, so just open jar and serve).
• use appliances to take over steps. i.e. electric slicer, stand/hand mixer, slow cooker, air fryer, instant pot, or “as seen on tv” style or aliexpress/daiso style kitchen gadgets like choppers, salad spinners, etc. don’t feel bound by using tools for only their original purpose! for example, instant pot is great at baking things while keeping them moist. that plus a quick broiler session in the oven makes for juicy roast meats!

these are just some tips based on how i cook and eat. i know not all the foods or techniques are applicable to everyone but hopefully this can help you abstractify and extrapolate to the foods that fit you and your environment.

some may not accept plating/serving these as true “cooking” but ultimately what’s the importance of “cooking” other than making sure your loved ones have food?

Have you identified what about cooking really gets under your skin?

I love the results of cooking, even so it took a LONG time for me to not resist cooking as much as I used to. I still find it a challenge to motivate myself to do it sometimes.

For me the ambiguity and keeping track of where I am is especially challenging, so any recipe I keep gets written in a way that works for me - it’s essentially a modified mis-en-place.

List of ingredients in the order they’ll be used. Anything that appears twice (like 2 Tablespoons oil, divided) gets divided on the ingredients list so I know what goes where.

Then directions/sequencing, with each major step clearly separated from the previous step. Trying to read a paragraph while cooking is problematic at best. I also like to number the steps so it’s easier to remember where I am.

For everything, ingredients and steps, I tack on the time it should take. Then I know in advance what to expect.

I think overall just planning and knowing exactly what you’re going to do when you step in the kitchen is key - otherwise we kind of flop around.

I love cooking, so I may not be the best person to trick your brain into loving it. For me, it’s a healthy thing to hyperfocus on, and I can nerd out and be obsess over my kitchen knives and carbon steel pans. The key is preparation and anticipation. This is where your neurotypical entourage might help. They organize, you cook.

Phase 1: planning in advance

• Plan the meals together. Schedule the whole week. Write them down somewhere visible and accessible. I find knowing in advance what to cook helps a lot. Leave no room for uncertainty and improvisation. Start simple so you can build your skills up. always cook something you know you’ll love.
• Buy all the necessary groceries for the whole week. A single missing ingredient might throw you off track. If necessary, reschedule some meals when best-before dates or time-sensitive ingredients are in conflict with the initial schedule.

Phase 2: prepping

• Plan for today’s meal. Get all the ingredients out. Get all the ustensils out. Mentally map your recipe.
• With a good knife and a good cutting board, cut everything that needs cutting. Don’t weight. Quantities are for pastry, not cooking. Always separate meat and veggies. If impossible, always cut meat last and thoroughly clean everything immediately afterwards.
• FYI, those two phases are called “mise en place”. They’re standard procedure in every single professional kitchen, and for a good reason. It’s all about efficiency.
• Always keep your work area clean.

Phase 3: cooking

• honestly, you’ve already done the hardest part. Just vibe with it. Sear, sautée, boil, season as you like.
• it’s done. Do the dishes immediately. Enjoy.

Bonus, ADHD edition

• Find something you can hyperobsess about. I love kitchen knives, I love caring for them and getting them razor sharp. I love knife skills. If you can get good with a knife, you can save so much time and even take shortcuts because you know you can dice an onion faster than the pan can heat up. I love carbon steel pans and keeping them seasoned and slick because they’re indestructible and can sear at temperatures that would turn any teflon pan in a toxic gas bomb.
• carbon steel ustensils are amazing for people like us. It’s vital to clean and dry them immediately after using them, otherwise they rust. They don’t need babysitting, they don’t need TLC. They just need to be used hard and immediate attention afterwards. That way, your knife and pans are always ready when you need them instead of sitting in dirty water for days/weeks in the sink.
• always cook something you’re excited about. If you don’t feel the rush to eat it, you won’t cook it. Period.
• Find whacky techniques you want to try out. Did you know that one of the best ways to sear a steak to perfection is to coat it in mayonnaise?

I’m the opposite of most here. Cooking can hold my attention on quick but medium complexity recipes. Add X, wait a few minutes mixing in high fire until it starts to water; add Y, keep mixing for another couple minutes until it starts to change color, etc. No period of just waiting, you’re always engaged. I find it relaxing, my mind focuses on just that one thing.