You've Saved 200 Recipes. When Did You Last Cook One?
24th July 2026
How do you cook more exciting things at home? Not by finding better recipes, you already have lots of those.
It's been close to 30 degrees. Five Met Éireann stations have officially hit heatwave status — Shannon, Athenry, Valentia, Moore Park and Oak Park — and the warm air is arriving on an easterly straight off the continent. Which means you've been thinking about somewhere else and you've been saving the food inspo.
The paella from the place near the beach and the prawns pil pil filmed by somebody in a bar you'll never find again. It's in the folder now, with the other two hundred.
We save what we wish we'd cook. We don't save what we actually cook.
Last November, Pinterest's own engineers published details about how people use the platform. Buried in it is a figure they had no reason to flatter: around nine in ten saved Pins aren't reopened in the week after they're saved.
Then they split it by topic. The ones they describe as requiring "more real-life practices" get saved the most and reopened the least. Cooking is a real-life practice, so you can see where this is going.
Psychologists have spent forty years measuring the distance between deciding to do a thing and actually doing it, across everything from exercise to eating. The finding is consistent: you can change someone's mind far more easily than you can change what they actually do.
Irish kitchens tell the same story.
Bord Bia once ran a study built on what people actually do rather than what they tell a survey they do. For a week, nearly six thousand people wrote down every evening meal as it happened.
Those diaries caught the distance between what people said and what they served. 23% said they'd been cooking more vegan meals that year. One per cent of the week's meals were vegan. As Bord Bia's own analyst put it, people tend to remember their choices as better than they were, and the original intention isn't always reflected in what lands on the table.
Between 2011 and 2019, the share of Irish adults regularly cooking from scratch fell from just over four in ten to three in ten. So what's going on?
How to Cook More at Home.
Five Reasons You Don't and What to Do About It.
People have good intentions and poor follow-through. So the question is what happens between wanting to make something and sitting down to eat it. When Irish researchers put that to home cooks, five things came up.
Problem 1: Not enough time
Almost everyone in the study said they were too busy to cook from raw ingredients with pressure points coming from work and family. And this isn’t just an Irish problem, when UK researchers logged how people spent their days, the ones cooking least were working over two hours more than the ones cooking most.
The Solution: Don't plan for the week, plan for a day
A free evening won’t magically appear, and you’re not going to go from cooking nothing to making something from scratch seven days a week. Pick one day, pick a single dish, and tie it to something already in your week, like:
On Thursday I have that meeting by the village, so I can pop into the fishmonger's and grab fresh prawns for pil pil.
Then you have one job built into the reality of your week. Want to try Prawns Pil Pil this week? Our resident Spanish food expert Jose Gomez has done a quick explainer for this super-fast dish over on our YouTube
Problem 2: The cost
People in the study reckoned a ready-made meal was the cheaper option and that cost was what put them off starting from scratch.
The Solution: Shop local, waste less
We've written before about how to shop local without breaking the bank, and waste is where most of it is won or lost. Aim to cook from scratch and use the lot: bones, trimmings and leftovers stretch one shop across several meals, and that's usually what makes it cheaper than the chilled ready version rather than the shopping itself.
Problem 3: Wanting something effortless
As one participant put it:
If you’re already hungry and you’re standing there smelling the food and stuff, that’s a nightmare, so if it can’t be prepped and cooked within 30 to 40 minutes I won’t bother.
The Solution: Pick something easy
Prawns Pil Pil is prawns, garlic, chilli and olive oil in a hot pan. It's on the table in less time than the delivery app takes to find a driver. Here's José's recipe — this is the one to start with.
Problem 4: Family food preferences
Anyone who’s ever had to meal-plan for a family knows the struggle of finding something everyone agrees on. Nobody wants to be stuck making four different dinner options.
The Solution: Easy picky plates
Tapas solves this by design as nobody gets handed a plate they didn't choose. Put six small things in the middle of the table and everyone can build their own, including the one who doesn't eat fish and the one who's off carbs this month. Eat family-style: different dishes, something for everyone — pasta & charcuterie, gyozas & a stir-fry, whatever you have the time for and they have the appetite for.
Problem 5: Kitchen disasters
Nothing knocks the adventure out of you like the memory of a previous failure. One bad night can put you off straying outside your repertoire for years.
The Solution: Learn in person
The recipe page may not reach you in the way learning in person can. A recipe gives you grams of garlic and millilitres of oil. It can't tell you what the oil should sound like when the prawns go in, or that you've taken it too far. You had the dish once, in a bar, so you already know what it should taste like. If it doesn’t match up, the recipe can’t tell you what happened but a person can.
Spanish Tapas & Paella with Chef José Gomez
€95 | Evening Course | 19:00–21:30 | 31st August 2026
José Gomez was born and raised in Santander. He's an award-winning chef who ran his own kitchen in England before coming to Ireland, and he's our resident expert on regional Spanish cooking.
The evening starts with the principles of paella — which rice, which pan, and why you don't need to hover over it — then José's own seafood version. Around it: tortilla patatas, ali-oli, mussels marinaras, prawns pil pil, croquetas de jamón, pan tumaca.
"I did my first lesson ever with the Spanish Tapas night. Jose, Antonio and the team were excellent. The set up there is top class. Great way to spend an evening."
— Peter: Spanish Tapas & Paella, May 2024
Frequently Asked Questions
- How do I cook more at home?
- Plan one dish, not a week's worth, and attach it to a trigger rather than a date e.g. "if it's Thursday and I'm passing the fishmonger, then it's prawns pil pil." Planning also works best for people who already want the thing, so if you have a folder of saved recipes you're the right candidate. The one part planning won't fix is not knowing whether you're doing it right — for that, a hands-on class will do more than another video.
- How can I cook more exciting things at home?
- Cook the recipes you keep saving, and cook it once with someone who can tell you when it's right. Most people don't need new recipes — they need to make one of the ones they already have. Learn a cuisine's building blocks rather than its dishes: with Spanish, that's the sofrito, the rice, and the emulsion behind an ali-oli. Get those and the recipes stop being separate things to memorise. Dublin Cookery School's Spanish Tapas & Paella with Chef José Gomez (€95, 31st August 2026, 19:00–21:30, Blackrock) covers paella principles, seafood paella, tortilla patatas, ali-oli, mussels marinaras, prawns pil pil, croquetas de jamón and pan tumaca. All levels welcome.
- Why do I save recipes and never make them?
- A saved recipe has no date, no shopping list, and no answer to whether you can manage it. Pinterest found around nine in ten saved Pins aren’t reopened within a week, and that the topics needing what they call "more real-life practices" are saved most and opened least.
- What Spanish dishes can I learn to cook in Dublin?
- Spanish Tapas & Paella with Chef José Gomez runs at Dublin Cookery School in Blackrock and covers the principles of making paella, José's seafood paella, tortilla patatas, al-ioli, mussels marinaras, prawns pil pil, croquetas de jamón and pan tumaca. It's an evening course, 19:00–21:30, €95, next date 31st August 2026. A second version with a different menu runs on 7th October (€105) and the two don't need to be taken in sequence.
- Do I need cooking experience to take a class at Dublin Cookery School?
- No. Classes are built so a beginner finds support through new techniques while more experienced cooks get pointers to sharpen what they already do. Dublin Cookery School is at 2 Brookfield Terrace, Blackrock, Co. Dublin A94 C9Y5 — about 20 minutes from the city centre by DART or bus. Evening classes start at 19:00. All levels welcome.
Fancy learning this hands-on? Browse our cooking classes in Dublin and cook it with us.