AIO friend using times we cook together as mini grocery hauls
ok so this is my first time posting in a subreddit like this but i really need to know if what i’m feeling is reasonable or not.
basically i (22f) have a friend who for the sake of this post we will call luna (22f). luna and i have been friends for nearly over a decade, but for a lot of it we lived in different places because i was an expat. well, starting last year we have begun living in the same city again and with that also comes us hanging out in person a lot more.
luna really really likes cooking and she’s actually quite good at it, so often she will offer to cook for me. i need you to understand i never ask or demand she does and i am also quite a good cook so i would not mind also doing the cooking for us (which i have mentioned to her several times), but she insists and is very possessive over it and so i let her have her fun. every time she cooks i do the dishes, and there’s usually quite a lot because she’s a bit of a messy cook, but i don’t particularly mind because it feels like we’re splitting the work equally between us.
now to the actual issue i wanna talk about, every time she does cook for us, she will buy the biggest bulk option of an ingredient available even if it is way over what we actually need for the food. some examples would be buying a 14 pack of sliced cheese when we only need two, buying a big tub of yogurt when we only need 100g, buying bulk veggies when the recipe only asks for half of one etc (you get the gist).
after she cooks, she will take all of the leftover groceries home with her, which isn’t an issue as i tend to be very good at grocery shopping for myself in terms of all of my other meals and don’t usually require anything extra. my issue is that she then proceeds to split every single item in half, regardless if for my portion she for example used 1 slice of cheese from the 14 bought.
honestly, if we hung out rarely i don’t think i would mind this much, but sometimes this happens multiple times a week, and by the end i basically end up covering a grocery trip i don’t even get 90% of groceries from. i should mention my financial situation is just slightly better than hers, but not anything crazy, only about 200€ extra a month, so i can’t really afford to basically cover her groceries as well as mine every month.
however, i do feel like maybe i’m overreacting? she does cook so maybe she believes the extra groceries is repayment for that? however i do end up washing 3 to 4 times the dishes i would whenever she cooks so i thought that evened everything out. and tbh i would also much rather just cook for myself than cover extra grocery costs every month, but she really loves cooking for people and insists it’s one of her love languages, so i also don’t wanna just ruin her vibe and tell her i don’t want her to cook for me anymore.
she also does this to other people and idk what their opinion is cus i tend to avoid talking about people behind their back but she would probably tell me if any of them brought something like this up since she pretty much tells me everything in her life.
yeah idk i don’t wanna seem ungrateful or like i wanna take advantage of her but on the months we hang out more i can literally see how i financially do worse in my grocery and food budget and again i’m not well off enough for it to not be an issue.
to add to this, i don’t even know how i would bring it up if i did, as she tends to get very emotional and not react well at all to confrontation unless she is the one doing the confronting (and even then she gets really angry and mean). she doesn’t take it constructively usually but rather as an attack on her as a person regardless of how i phrase it or what i do. anyway, is this worth even bringing up? would you do it if you were in my shoes or would you just absorb the extra cost? basically, am i overreacting feeling like this is unfair and wanting to bring it up? thanks.