I think too much ambition to be able to home-cook every kind of food under the sun leads to much of this trouble. Focus on a narrower set of things—say, 2-3 nat

I think too much ambition to be able to home-cook every kind of food under the sun leads to much of this trouble. Focus on a narrower set of things—say, 2-3 national/regional/ethnic cuisines, and/or cooking techniques—and most of the difficulty, expense, and even planning of home cooking goes away. The wildly globe-hopping table of the home cook is a recent, and kinda silly, development. You can get plenty of variety without trying to prepare meals from every continent. (this goes out the window if it's a major hobby, obviously, but in that case so should complaints about its difficulty/inconvenience, which are entirely self-imposed)