Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" is a great book to read (it kicked off the popularization of food science), and Alton Brown's "Good Eats" was a fantastic c

Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" is a great book to read (it kicked off the popularization of food science), and Alton Brown's "Good Eats" was a fantastic cooking show full of great kitchen geekery. I've also heard that "The Four-Hour Chef" (yes, God help us, same guy) is actually a good starter book. Also, "Cookwise" and "Bakewise." Great books. More personally, let me say that the best way to learn how to cook is to go to the market, find some stuff that looks interesting, and then figure out what to do with them. Pretty soon you'll have an intuitive idea of techniques to use with almost anything you can find, which is when the fun stuff really starts. Don't get intimidated! If you can cook pasta without ruining it, you have it in you to make duck-egg carbonara with house-cured bacon and Swiss chard over homemade fettuccine. Oh, and get some good knives and keep them sharp. Trust me.