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Does something similar exist in metric? It’s a chore to translate every item.
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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.
When I was young my mum bought me a cookbook and once a week, usually Sundays, we would make a recipe or two
This is why it might seem so easy to you, wouldn’t you think?
Well obviously OP can’t go back in time to when they were a child, but there’s nothing to stop them getting a cook book once a week and trying out a recipe or two.
I mean, yeah, obviously. But claiming it’s really easy because you were lucky to have normal parents and have been doing it since you were kid, especially on a question that implies someone didn’t have the luxury, is not helping.
You’re taking a lot for granted here. Most cookbooks tell you what to do but don’t teach you what to do. If you already know how to cook, a cookbook can teach you how to cook X, but they don’t really teach you how to cook.
It may sound meaningless, but the best way to learn to cook is to cook. Learning by doing, that is the way.
Agreed. You can’t really mess up that badly when cooking. Burnt bits can be scraped off and there’s always a way to fix food when you season too much.
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.
This is great advice!
before you start cooking, first you have to learn to sammich
YouTube
Yeah YouTube is a pretty good place to learn how to cook, I’ve learnt a lot from Binging with Babish.
You start by learning how to pour cereal
keep a fire extinguisher handy though
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?
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.
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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.
Similar idea to this is to look at CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in your area. Each are a bit different but the ideal would be one where you can do a smaller share that will let you get a wide variety of produce in weekly pickups. I’m subscribed to one this summer I’m quite liking. Each week it’s a different variety of fruit and veggies with recipe recommendations. They give out pack lists in advance so you can do your shopping to make sure you have what you need for cooking (because it doesn’t give you everything like a meal kit).
The big thing is it forces you to figure things out and just try things to a greater degree than meal kits in my opinion. Like recently summer squash and zucchinis were in season so I ended up cut them up together and throwing them in butter and oil really lazily due to some random recipe suggestion I found. Had too much zucchini left over so tried out zoodles which is surprisingly trivial. I’ve even now done quick pickling because they gave me so many fucking mini-cucumbers, which also is surpringly easy as long as you have glass jars. I liked that especially as it gives me much more of a sense that I actually made something VS something immediately eaten.
It’s only about a year ago I started making any attempts at cooking, having the CSA has done a lot more for pushing me into the deep end than anything else. I tried meal kits in the past and it never really stuck with me or felt less overwhelming. Starting from an ingredient just seems to click more for me, but it’ll definitely depend on what is it about cooking that’s a problem for you. For me I knew the basic mechanics and have no problem grocery shopping but how ingredients combine and why was a mystery that following a complex recipe roboticly didn’t help with.
I know not everyone has the same availability for access to local farms and it can be an upfront cost that’s difficult for people. But if you look around you might be surprised what’s available, some farms will really go out of their way to make things convenient since CSA can be a huge way for them to stay in operation. And you get a lot of the freshest food possible over the course of months.
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
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.
Agree that meal boxes are a good training step. We started using blue apron and after we got the hang of things, realized how much cheaper it would be to buy the ingredients on our own. The bottles of sauces can be pricey up front, but once you have a collection of them, cooking is easier and cheaper. Also, people are really impressed if you can impromptu make something without having to go out shopping.
I felt like a true adult when I decided to make hummus one day and just happened to have everything for it.
