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I could say:

  1. " If she comes I will cook something special"

I can imagine that if I want to emphasize that it is my plan to cook something nice I could use present continuous instead of future simple and say

  1. "If she comes I'm cooking something special"

Yet, 2 may be ambiguous it can also mean that I already started cooking before she came.

My big concern is what if I report my 2 example in indirect speech. Then, it becomes

  1. "If she came I was cooking something special"

So, in the past it has only one meaning that I started cooking before her arrival but it's weired that only by reporting one meaning is excluded or I'm mistaken somewhere?

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  • #3 works differently but it's not reported speech. You're saying if it was true that she visited Monday, then yes I must have been cooking for her. All 3 need a comma before the "I" part.
    – Yosef Baskin
    Commented Jun 21 at 21:51
  • It would be better to use "I am/was going to cook" to talk about a plan. I would personally avoid No.2 and No.3. To me, these would imply a spur of the moment decision, not a plan.
    – Billy Kerr
    Commented Jun 21 at 21:57
  • This feels very familiar. Searching the site for text from this question, I don't see a duplicate, but I feel like I remember it from a few weeks or months ago?
    – Andy Bonner
    Commented Jun 21 at 23:00
  • Heh, maybe I'm thinking of the similar question from earlier today. Anyway, the whole #3 section isn't clear enough to answer yet. It isn't indirect speech, it's just a sentence in quotation marks, and "If/then" doesn't work in such simple ways in the past. That's just because the future is unknown, so we can use conditionals about it a lot, but the past is set in stone. We could use conditionals when describing a point in the past in which we were unsure what was about to happen... but that's so complicated it deserves its own question.
    – Andy Bonner
    Commented Jun 22 at 0:03
  • Meanwhile, "2 may be ambiguous it can also mean that I already started cooking before she came": No, it can't have that meaning; it's just like simple future. You might be thinking of "If she comes I'll be cooking," but that still doesn't have the ambiguous meaning that "When she comes" does, since the "if/then" conditional makes the cooking a consequence of the coming.
    – Andy Bonner
    Commented Jun 22 at 0:07

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