Why planning and cooking need separate questions
A household that only asks cooking questions in an interview finds out, weeks later, that groceries are being bought day by day with no sense of what's coming next, or that every week looks the same because nobody is actually planning it. Cooking ability tells you whether a dish turns out well once the ingredients are already on the counter. It says nothing about whether someone can look at a week ahead and decide, unprompted, what the household should eat and what that will cost.
Ask directly: in her last household, did she decide what to cook each day herself, or was she given a menu or a shopping list to work from. Both are legitimate arrangements, but they call for different levels of independence, and the honest answer tells you which one you're actually hiring for.
- Ask whether she planned meals herself or cooked from a given menu in her last role.
- Ask her to describe how she'd vary a week of meals, not just name one dish.
- Ask what she'd do if a planned ingredient wasn't available or was too expensive that week.
Assessing grocery budgeting and fresh-ingredient judgment
Give a real, rough figure, your household's typical weekly grocery spend, and ask how she'd divide it across a week of meals for the number of people in your home. Listen for whether she reasons about it at all (more on protein early in the week, cheaper vegetables toward the end, buying in bulk where it makes sense) rather than simply agreeing that she 'can stick to a budget.' There's no single correct answer here; what matters is whether she has a process.
Ask, too, whether she has chosen fresh produce, fish or meat herself, at a wet market or a supermarket, without someone else picking it or handing her a fixed list. This is a distinct, practical judgment: recognising freshness, comparing prices between stalls or vendors, and adjusting a plan on the spot if something isn't good that day. A candidate who has only ever cooked from ingredients bought by someone else may need time to build this, and that's worth knowing before day one rather than after.
What to do with what you learn
If a candidate cooks well but has never planned or shopped independently, that's not disqualifying, it's information. Some households want a helper who executes a menu the employer sets; others want someone who takes meal-planning off their plate entirely. Naming which one you need, before the interview, makes the rest of these questions far more useful.
Where a strict dietary restriction or a tight household budget is central to your daily meals, treat this as worth confirming early rather than assuming it will work itself out, similar to how a cooking-specific dietary question deserves its own direct answer rather than a general yes.