Making a Sim "Younger"
Life Fruit
You can reduce a Sim's age by a single day by eating a raw Life Fruit. However, they can only be planted by a level 7 Gardener and the "Unknown Special Seeds" or "Life Seeds" are only available under certain circumstances:
Sims can receive the seed by searching the town, as a science career reward, by exploring the catacombs in a mausoleum, fishing it out of a body of water, or while using the Time Machine.
Source: Sims 3 Wikia, Life Fruit page
Ambrosia
The better option is to cook Ambrosia, which resets the Sims age to a predefined value (adults eating it will reset to have 26 days until aging). It can also bring Ghost Sims back to life.
Ambrosia requires purchasing the recipe (ยง12000), a level 10 Cooking Skill and then one Life Fruit and one Deathfish as ingredients.
A deathfish can only be caught with level 10 Fishing skill, from the Graveyard between midnight and 5AM and needs angelfish bait. Note that if you catch enough deathfish you can stock a pond and have a supply of these available all day round.
Young Again potion
This potion requires the Generations pack and is created using a chemistry set, it resets a Sim who is older than a young adult back to day 1 of the young adult.
You will need a high Logic skill for this.
Prevent / slow down further aging
Age Freeze Potion
Another potion, so also requires the Generations pack. This is a lifetime reward that requires 65000 lifetime happiness to obtain. Drinking it will completely stop your Sim from aging further. Note that if you eat birthday cake after drinking the potion, your aging will start up again.
Change form
If you have the relevant expansion pack, you could also get the Sim converted to a Vampire or Mummy, as they have longer life spans.
Cheats
If you enable the "god mode" cheat (testingcheatsenabled true) in the cheat console, which is activated by pressing control, shift and c in unison, you can decrease the sim's age, but only in the given stage of life. By shift clicking the sim, and editing them (you don't even have to change anything) in create a sim, the game will set their life back to the first day of whatever stage they are in.
The Sims 3 is notorious for high CPU and resource usage, especially when you get multiple households and things going. Try opening up the task manage (ctrl+shift+esc) while playing and take a look at the CPU and Memory percentages. If they are pegged at 100% or close to it, that may be the problem.
The game does try to "optimize" by instead of the entire game chugging, only certain processes of it do, like sim behavior and the background world simulation (which is why everyone is tired). Something to try is lower the various settings, or removing households you don't really care about so the background simulation doesn't have to work as hard(backup your save in case this doesn't work!).
Best Answer
The opportunity isn't miss-able (unless you have opportunities turned off), and will happen on it's own automatically after enough days pass by.
Once you have your playable ghost (by completing the opportunity) your deceased sim is able to do everything they could do in life. Yes, everything.
This means she is able to cook just as well as when she was alive; if you have the ingredients for ambrosia, all she needs to do is cook and eat the recipe and she'll be returned to her mortal coil.