No Stupid Questions

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Can you follow directions? Congratulations, you can cook! It's really not that difficult, cooking is just simple chemistry.

When I was young my mum bought me a cookbook and once a week, usually Sundays, we would make a recipe or two that were in it. Sometimes full meals, sometimes just desserts, etc. You'll learn by doing, so get yourself a cookbook or find a cooking show to watch if you're a more visual learner. Just put yourself out there and try. I believe in you.

It may sound meaningless, but the best way to learn to cook is to cook. Learning by doing, that is the way.

Start small - like a fried egg. All you need is a pan, a spatula, some butter/oil and an egg itself.

Then upgrade to an omlette.

Then omlette du fromage.

Then a pirate's eye (egg in a slice of bread/bagel). Add some dill.

Boil some potatoes.

Mash some boiled potatoes.

Rice is simple - just boil it for some time.

Essentially - you'll learn by doing. Just don't start with making your own bread and you'll be fine.

When starting to cook on my own, I always found it very stressful, because I felt you had to do so many things in parallel and then you look away for too long at the wrong time and something burns.

What helped me is reading the whole recipe very carefully and then prepare everything before actually starting to cook. Many recipes tell you something like "while x simmers, cut y / prepare z". That's fine, when you have developed a feeling for how long things take, but as a beginner, it's better to do everything sequentially. It takes longer that way, but it makes it much less stressful and overwhelming.

before you start cooking, first you have to learn to sammich

YouTube

You start by learning how to pour cereal

you'll need a pot, and/or a skillet, and a source of heat. without that you'll eat a lot of cabbage and apples, but you still need a knife. if you want to lazy up to spices: parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. there's an old hippy song on that. and, it's really difficult to fuck up a baked potato.

We used Hello Fresh. Both my partner and I had basic cooking skills, but were not very good cooks. He was also a very picky eater. Hello Fresh reduced the overwhelming amount of recipes in the world down to a more reasonable number to choose from. As we kept going, we started to see the same techniques, like reduction sauces, happen in new configurations and we started to understand how they work, not just follow the instructions. It also helped my partner overcome a lot of his pickiness by being in control of what recipes we had each week, allowing him to explore new ingredients when he felt comfortable.

of the websites that I used to learn how to cook some fifteen, twenty years ago, serious eats is still pretty reliable. I like their articles - they tell you why food cooks the way it does

I highly recommend subscribing to a meal delivery kit for a few weeks, I think they’re fantastic for beginners. Reasons:

• Grocery shopping and ingredient portioning is already done for you, allowing you to focus on the cooking
• Ability to try new ingredients without committing to buying a full quantity of the ingredient. It sucks when you buy a specific sauce for a new recipe you want to try, only to realize you’re never going to want to use it again.
• Enough choices in recipes but not an overwhelming amount; there are so many recipes and resources online that that’s all you need to learn, but it can be overwhelming and hard to know where to start
• Recipes are generally standardized, well-tested, and don’t require special equipment or advanced techniques

I definitely don’t recommend doing this long term because it starts to get repetitive and is ultimately more expensive than doing your own shopping and planning, but it removes quite a few barriers to entry. Home Chef was the one I enjoyed the most personally but Blue Apron is also reliable and liked by many. Once you are comfortable with the basics you can really just search any recipe you’re interested in and just go for it; follow your interests and the skills will come with experience.

Meal kit delivery services are awesome, in my opinion. They send you the ingredients for like 3 meals every week. For me personally, the worst part about trying to cook was always looking at a cookbook and realizing you don't have all the ingredients. So this takes the shopping out of the equation, which just makes it super simple. I've talked to a few people that don't like them, so they're not for everyone.

Genuine question with no intention to talk down on someone: how are there adults that don't know how to cook at least the basics? My mother told me a story about how she went on a trip at school and a teacher that apparently had never cooked before wanted to make spaghetti by putting them in the cold water and then boiling them. Ended up with a huge fused chunk of pasta. How can you not know how to at least make pasta as an adult? Parents and then partner that always cook for you?

Buy a cookbook and just start making the things that look good. It comes with practice.

My mother taught me how to cook basic stuff at an early age and every time she would remind it was important I knew how to make my own food in case something happened to her.

Kindergarten age: make your own chocolate milk 6 y/o to 8: Learn how to boil rice, learn how to cook pasta. Sandwiches. 8+ : fried eggs, potato and pumpkin mash. Veal and chicken schnitzel (crumbed) is very easy too, though time consuming. Cooking steak in the oven is very easy, same for chicken drumsticks. You don't need to add anything to it, just salt or lemon, remember to oil the tray though.

Learn to wash veg thoroughly for salads. Lemon, olive oil and salt make a good dressing 90% of the time. Grate carrots. Learn you can boil legumes too.
At this point, with this knowledge and a can opener you have enough resources to eat healthily and cook your own very easily. I still eat pretty much this most of the time and I'm in my mid 30s now.

Next come omelettes, meatballs, patties. Quiche is super easy too. Once you master this level you can easily follow more complex recipes from any book. If you got any questions for the basic recipes just let me know.

Delia Smith's "How to cook" series of books were an absolute godsend when I first moved into a house by myself.

Here's a UK link so you can see how it looks.

https://www.wob.com/en-gb/books/delia-smith/delia-s-how-to-cook-book-one/9780563384304

Book one starts with eggs - how to poach, boil, fry them, how to make, then how to use them in basic recipes like omelettes and scrambled egg, then ramps up in complexity slowly again.

They're super basic, super easy to follow, and I still run and get them sometimes when I want something to be perfect and need to jog my memory.

Another, more expensive but delicious method, is to order food from hello fresh (you can get a trial membership with heavy discounts at the start).

They send you all the ingredients you need, already weighed and in little bags, all you have to do is follow the instructions they've sent you using the ingredients in the bag.

Really good way to get used to making meals, as you don't need to worry about if you've bought the right ingredients.

I cancelled my membership as A) it worked out too expensive, and B) I didn't have time or energy to prepare a meal every day of the week! But the food was great and opened some culinary doors in my brain.

I learned from trial and error, asking for help from those who could, and cooking shows. Specifically good eats with Alton brown, he explains the science behind different aspects of cooking and it helps you to understand the *why * of each step instead of just doing what you're told.

Try to deliberately learn something each time you cook.

Feel like curry? YouTube how to make it from raw spices. Feel like soup? YouTube how to make your own stock. Didn't like a meal? Ask yourself what you didn't like, was it the texture? Cooking time? a particular ingredient? If it was an ingredient, learn about other ways to prepare that ingredient, or find another version of that recipe and do it slightly different next time.

Once you learn many recipes you start to acquire techniques and knowledge of how flavours balance and interact. These days if I want to make something I will find 5 versions of that recipe, see what's common and unique. I'll use only the bits I want because I have a feel for the general flavours, what I like or don't like, what's in my pantry today.

So, learn new dishes on YouTube. Try to watch videos where they are actual qualified chefs who explain not just how but why they do something.

Above all, give yourself time. You gain confidence when you know what works after years of trial and error.

Pick the simplest things you enjoy eating and start with those. I usually just cooked the same thing over and over until I got fed up of them. This is okay as long as your diet remains diverse.

And not everything needs to be cooked. Make use of cold salads and such. I love olives. Olive oil is awesome for both salad and cooking. Salads are often seen as the main dish but I much prefer them as a side, like rice.

Follow the recipe as best as you can at first. You'll be fine, the only important thing is food safety, e.g. handling raw chicken.

Oh and btw even pros screw up their cooking here and there. Don't feel too bad if you get it wrong while millions of kids starve out there.

The two basic steps to making food are to combine food and heat them.

Sandwiches and salads are examples of food that are only combined. Toast and poptarts are examples of foods that are only heated.

Typically, you start with something simple: pasta, eggs, etc. These are basically just cooking with little to no prep.

Later, you can start working on foods that need both prep and heating.

No matter how you learn, remember that you will mess up a lot and don't let that discourage you. Just try to learn from it and remember it for next time.

Youtube.

Start with the suoer basics. Such as: how to boil rice, how to boil pasta, or something like that.

Boiling is the simplest. With pasta you can grab a bit and just taste it. If its still solid on the inside, its not done yet.

But read the instructions on the package. Its usually pretty accurate.

When youve nailed one you move on to make something else. Like.. frying an egg etc

Remember when cooking.. you almost NEVER turn the heat all the way up.

My stove only goes up to 3. So i keep it around 1.5 or 2. If i set it to 3, the food will get burnt on the outside but still raw on the inside. (This is ok for steaks but not much else)

Practice! Dont give up. Just because you screwed up cooking some chicken once, soesnt mean you cant learn it. Consider what went wrong, try to prevent that from happening again.

When things are just boiling or slowly frying, instead of staring into the wall or your phone, clean up stuff. This makes it more managable. A dirty kitchen is not a good idea.

Also when it comes to salt.. too much salt means you cant eat it. Too little salt? Just add more. So, when in doubt, add little to no salt. You can always taste it, then add more.