Cooking is just the act of preparing food, especially by heating. Anything else is just people being snobs. Just go prepare your food and stop caring about peoples opinions on it.

Most rented bedrooms in my area dont even have built-in lighting. Its all floor and table lamps, usually on a smart outlet these days

Just fyi, Watts is a measure of power, and WattHours is power over time. So your home network and server consume 130w, which would be 130wh after an hour, or 3120wh after a day. The chest freezer would be 400wh in a day, rather than 400w in a day.