Cooking, because it’s done every night, can soon turn into a bland routine. Here are 9 ways to spice things up and put the fun back into the kitchen.

Have Theme Nights

There are many great ethnic food options out there to be savored and explored. Why not treat your family to themed food evenings. Whether it’s Moroccan Mondays, Turkish Tuesdays or Thai Thursdays, your loved ones will benefit greatly from the variety, different ingredients, textures and flavors.

Your themed nights don’t have to be limited to different cultures either. You could have a vegetarian night, a fish night or even a club sandwich evening. Your themed choices are only limited by your imagination.

Turn Up the Tunes

Cooking can and should be your time. It’s an opportunity to let your creative juices flow and your inner spirit emerge. There’s no better way to do so than to turn up your favorite tunes and boogie while you cook. Listening to music while you cook will make the whole process far more enjoyable, relaxing and mindful. You can even find websites that will present you with a playlist of the ideal songs to pair with the food you are preparing. 

Team Up

While cooking on your own can be an extremely soothing and mindful experience, teaming up with friends can also be extremely refreshing. Cooking with your friends will overcome the boredom that is incumbent to some aspects of cooking. You’ll also be able to encourage one another to experiment with new and different ingredients and speed up the preparation time. A team cooking session which usually also produces some truly comical moments, which is always a bonus!

The Food Bar Option

Setting up a food bar on your kitchen serving bench will allow your family and friends to customize their own meals. You can set up Subway style with the different ingredients in serving bowls so that each person can customize their own meal. That way you won’t have to try and meet the needs of every person in one dish. 

Max Out Your Kitchen

Turn your kitchen into your favorite place by picking up the cool little knick knacks that will make cooking more pleasurable. Spend some time cleaning it so that everything looks pristine. Be sure to use eco friendly cleaning products. You can also use a natural fragrance enhancer to make the kitchen an even more enjoyable place to spend time in. 

One Pot Dishes

Some nights it all seems too much. The thought of spending up to an hour preparing a dinner meal and then having to face a pile of dirty pots and pans can do your head in. The solution is to whip up a one pot wonder that you can put together in a few minutes and not have to face a ton of dishes. Check out these 31 great one pot meals that you can cook in under 15 minutes:

Get Artistic

A big part of our appreciation of food comes down to the presentation. In fact, images of sumptuously presented dishes are among the most popular downloads to Instagram. Imagine how great it would feel to serve up a dish to your friends and have them be so impressed that they share it on Instagram. You can make that happen by playing with your food a little in order to enhance its presentation appeal.Think avocado spirals on toast!

You can buy little gadgets that allow you to create patterns out of food items with perfect symmetry. Let your creativity flow and experiment to see what sort of culinary masterpiece you can conjure up. 

Relax

There are a lot of things to worry about in life. Stressing over the fact that your potatoes may not be perfectly roasted shouldn’t be one of them. It is inevitable that things are going to go wrong in the kitchen from time to time. Those are the times we need to be able to laugh at ourselves and not take it all too seriously. If worse comes to worse, you can always throw it all in the bin and order KFC!