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I don’t think that those are good analogies. Cooking for yourself is more akin to bathing yourself or wiping your own butt. It’s super easy if you grow up assum

I don’t think that those are good analogies. Cooking for yourself is more akin to bathing yourself or wiping your own butt. It’s super easy if you grow up assuming that you should be doing those things yourself and unbelievably expensive if you pay others to do it for you.

mulmen 6y ago
Do you have advice for someone that did not grow up assuming they should be cooking for them self? I've been making an effort to improve myself and it has been rewarding but honestly cooking for myself has been one of the steepest learning curves in my life. It is starting to pay off after months of effort motivated by a once-a-century global disaster. This is not an approachable skill, at all.
- ohyes 6y ago
  Unfortunately a lot of online recipes and cookbooks are for people looking to make something different and special, not looking for an everyday meal. Being a home cook (as opposed to being a chef) is actually a lot like programming. Learn a few simple patterns and you can recombine them in different ways. Look for patterns in any recipes that you follow and then you can reuse them in other situations. I can give some examples. Basic cream sauce from fat (butter or pan grease), liquid (normally milk or stock), flour and seasoning. The many ways of cooking eggs. Basic grilled cheese Seasoning with salt and pepper tasting and adjusting as you go Pancake variations Biscuit variations Quick-breads Temperatures of doneness for meats (there are charts, get a good meat thermometer). Chopping (you really need at least one good knife). For example, I can make a very nice sandwich by combining white sauce, a fried egg, and a grilled cheese. (Put a fried egg and cheese and inside the sandwich, lightly coat with white sauce, fry as with grilled cheese. Season with salt and pepper. I make biscuits, boil pasta or veggies and cover them with a very similar white sauce. Boil macaroni and some broccoli, add cheese to the white sauce heating until it melts, combine both in a baking pan with some breadcrumbs on top, bake until it looks set (25-35 minutes at 350(f) is a good bet). Basically the idea is to learn a few basic recipes (each a different ‘sub process’ or function) and use or them combine them with other ingredients that you have. Taste every so often to ensure that you don’t make something inedible. Give it your full attention. Sometimes you’ll make something truly weird and other times you’ll make something amazing and different that no one’s ever had before. Just don’t burn your house down and don’t deep fry anything until you’ve got plenty of experience and know the dangers. Obviously the recipes I’m giving are very vague, thats kind of the point as it is all up to your taste, which is different from mine. The key is paying attention to what you think is good.
- websterisk 6y ago
  Speaking for myself; one of the most meaningful pieces to me was understanding the "why". For example, if you read a cookbook, it will tell you precisely "what" to do. A good cookbook or a recipe-like youtube video will tell you "how" to do it. If all you ever do is make that one recipe, the "what" and the "how" can get you there if that is how your brain works (mine doesn't). Understanding "why" this step is before that step, or "why" the temperature needs to be as it suggests, or "why" the ingredients are in that ratio... that unlocks an entirely new level of cooking. Now you can go off-recipe or make ingredient replacements to accommodate what's in the fridge or try something you've never even seen before with reasonably high confidence that it will come out well. It is like the difference between memorizing your multiplication table and really understanding multiplication. Or the difference between being able to follow directions from point A to point B and knowing the area well enough to chart a path to the destination regardless of roadblocks. In any case, I am a science nerd (as I assume many of you are). For me, the show Good Eats (or honestly, most of what Alton Brown does) was a refreshing and educational angle that developed and supported a lot of my understanding about "why" as it relates to food.
- lynndotpy 6y ago
  I'd recommend starting out with recipes, or books aimed toward beginners. I was in this spot, and Bittman's "The Basics" book was amazingly useful. It certainly takes a lot of time to learn, especially as an adult without another person to teach them, and the wasted time and money from a failed dish can be greatly discouraging.
- muffinman26 6y ago
  The approach I took in college was to ease in to it, not by slowly dialing down the amount of times I ate out, but by buying boxed meals and adding to them: Buy a cheap food that you can stand that is boxed (mac and cheese, canned soup, ramen) and add some vegetables or pre-cooked meat you like to fill it out. Cook the vegetables with the meal and follow the directions on the box. Even after eight years, I still do this several times a week to have easy cooking days. Next, try cooking something a little more involved but use a prepared base. Buy pasta or a pizza crust and add your own toppings plus store-bought tomato sauce, for example. Again, the directions should be on the packaging. Next, choose some foods that you like but don't know how to make yourself. Find a simple recipe and pair it down to the bare minimum. For example, I like lasagna so I found a simple recipe that only had a half-dozen ingredients and bought noodles that don't need to be pre-cooked. Mix it up with a fully prepared meal (either order take-out or a frozen pizza or something) once or twice a week. When you get started cooking, it can be easy to miss a key nutrient that you need and having a cheat-day where you eat something you're more used to and can't mess up makes things much easier. When you're starting up, stick to 1-2 cuisine types. Each cuisine has its own staples and commonly used spices, that they combine in different ways. Figure out what makes good staples for your chosen cuisine and how to prepare them (not necessarily from scratch). Find the commonly-used spices and add them to everything, experimenting to see how much you want to add. For example, Italian food uses a lot of pasta or pizza crusts. Fresh pasta tastes much better than boxed pasta, but isn't shelf-stable. Pasta cooking times are short but generally somewhat precise. To cook Italian pasta, you'd want to learn how to tell that pasta is fully cooked. Mexican food uses rice and tortillas instead of pasta and pizza crusts. Pre-cooking your tortillas makes a huge difference. Cooking rice in a rice-cooker is easy, and it's do-able in a pot. The trick to cooking rice in a pot is that, since it's steam-cooked, checking the rice early can really slow down and mess-up the process. The first several times will be slow and messy, but once you figure out how long to wait it's actually quite low effort.
- kls 6y ago
  First and foremost get a thermometer, until you can trust you experience, cook meat with a thermometer. You will get better results. I am color blind so I use a thermometer to this day. Then start with the basics, as they translate between meat and most non-starch vegetables: Learn to fry. Learn to grill. Learn to broil. learn to roast. learn to stew. breading and frying a mushroom is no different than breading and frying a chicken strip other than some temp adjustments and length of time. Frying is not the healthiest but it can be offset some with better healthier oil. That being said, it covers up a multitude of food sins. As log as you let fried food drain and dry it's hard to mess it up. Second learn the 5 basic tastes salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami and how they blend. Sweet and salty blend, sweet and sour blend to tart, sweet and bitter cancel each other to brine. Sweet will dominate umami, salty will enhance umami, bitter and sour will compound each other. Once you know these it is really easy to taste ingredients and know if they will go together. It also gives you the knowledge of how to undue over flavoring. If it's too sour you can usually offset with sweet to get it to tart. If it is too bitter you can usually balance it with salty and sweet to mute it. Learn to make a starch, take your pick noodles, rice, potatoes etc. Then learn to enhance them with your 5 basic tastes. Learn to make 3-4 vegetables, green beans, broccoli, squash are all really safe and hard to get wrong. They can be bland without enough salt but are pretty safe, they still don't really taste bad if you overcook them. So basically learn to cook meat, a starch and some vegetables and flavor it, you would be surprised how far you can get with a steak, salt and pepper (salty, bitter, umami). Same with a piece of chicken, a lemon, salt and pepper (sour, salty, bitter). Stick to your basic ingredients for flavor, salt, pepper, sugar, lemon, msg or soy sauce (but remember soy sauce brings salty and umami in one package), should cover the basic flavors. Once you have this you can taste other ingreedients and know how they will blend into a flavor profile. Take the chicken example what if we reduce the lemon and pepper and add mustard. Mustard brings both sour and bitter. I honestly never tried it, but I know I could make it into a dish that taste good. Most vegetables can be treated like meat when seasoning, starches not so much stick to salty and umami for now with starches. Once you are comfortable with that, learn to use butter creams, eggs and cheeses in dishes particularly your starches. Once you are comfortable with that expand on spices and learn how to make a mirepoix and the Cajun variant. You would be surprised how much this mix enhances even the most simple dish. This is where you level up, people will talk about how good you cook when you get to this basic level of cooking. At this point you will have the knowledge to decide if you want to keep going or if you are comfortable with your skills. You will be able to create a decent meal no matter the ingredients you have on hand at this point. From here it is really if you want to get into more nuanced disciplines of cooking e.g bread baking, BBQ, sous vide, etc. If you get your meat to temp without overcooking, have a good handle on the basic tastes, can make a handful of vegetables and a starch, you will have a good foundation. This can be achieved in 2-3 months of cooking at least 2 times a week.
diehunde 6y ago
That would be true if by cooking you mean boiling some pasta for 10 minutes or eating some scrabble eggs. That's hardly cooking.

mulmen 6y ago

Do you have advice for someone that did not grow up assuming they should be cooking for them self? I've been making an effort to improve myself and it has been rewarding but honestly cooking for myself has been one of the steepest learning curves in my life. It is starting to pay off after months of effort motivated by a once-a-century global disaster. This is not an approachable skill, at all.

ohyes 6y ago
Unfortunately a lot of online recipes and cookbooks are for people looking to make something different and special, not looking for an everyday meal. Being a home cook (as opposed to being a chef) is actually a lot like programming. Learn a few simple patterns and you can recombine them in different ways. Look for patterns in any recipes that you follow and then you can reuse them in other situations. I can give some examples. Basic cream sauce from fat (butter or pan grease), liquid (normally milk or stock), flour and seasoning. The many ways of cooking eggs. Basic grilled cheese Seasoning with salt and pepper tasting and adjusting as you go Pancake variations Biscuit variations Quick-breads Temperatures of doneness for meats (there are charts, get a good meat thermometer). Chopping (you really need at least one good knife). For example, I can make a very nice sandwich by combining white sauce, a fried egg, and a grilled cheese. (Put a fried egg and cheese and inside the sandwich, lightly coat with white sauce, fry as with grilled cheese. Season with salt and pepper. I make biscuits, boil pasta or veggies and cover them with a very similar white sauce. Boil macaroni and some broccoli, add cheese to the white sauce heating until it melts, combine both in a baking pan with some breadcrumbs on top, bake until it looks set (25-35 minutes at 350(f) is a good bet). Basically the idea is to learn a few basic recipes (each a different ‘sub process’ or function) and use or them combine them with other ingredients that you have. Taste every so often to ensure that you don’t make something inedible. Give it your full attention. Sometimes you’ll make something truly weird and other times you’ll make something amazing and different that no one’s ever had before. Just don’t burn your house down and don’t deep fry anything until you’ve got plenty of experience and know the dangers. Obviously the recipes I’m giving are very vague, thats kind of the point as it is all up to your taste, which is different from mine. The key is paying attention to what you think is good.
websterisk 6y ago
Speaking for myself; one of the most meaningful pieces to me was understanding the "why". For example, if you read a cookbook, it will tell you precisely "what" to do. A good cookbook or a recipe-like youtube video will tell you "how" to do it. If all you ever do is make that one recipe, the "what" and the "how" can get you there if that is how your brain works (mine doesn't). Understanding "why" this step is before that step, or "why" the temperature needs to be as it suggests, or "why" the ingredients are in that ratio... that unlocks an entirely new level of cooking. Now you can go off-recipe or make ingredient replacements to accommodate what's in the fridge or try something you've never even seen before with reasonably high confidence that it will come out well. It is like the difference between memorizing your multiplication table and really understanding multiplication. Or the difference between being able to follow directions from point A to point B and knowing the area well enough to chart a path to the destination regardless of roadblocks. In any case, I am a science nerd (as I assume many of you are). For me, the show Good Eats (or honestly, most of what Alton Brown does) was a refreshing and educational angle that developed and supported a lot of my understanding about "why" as it relates to food.
lynndotpy 6y ago
I'd recommend starting out with recipes, or books aimed toward beginners. I was in this spot, and Bittman's "The Basics" book was amazingly useful. It certainly takes a lot of time to learn, especially as an adult without another person to teach them, and the wasted time and money from a failed dish can be greatly discouraging.
muffinman26 6y ago
The approach I took in college was to ease in to it, not by slowly dialing down the amount of times I ate out, but by buying boxed meals and adding to them: Buy a cheap food that you can stand that is boxed (mac and cheese, canned soup, ramen) and add some vegetables or pre-cooked meat you like to fill it out. Cook the vegetables with the meal and follow the directions on the box. Even after eight years, I still do this several times a week to have easy cooking days. Next, try cooking something a little more involved but use a prepared base. Buy pasta or a pizza crust and add your own toppings plus store-bought tomato sauce, for example. Again, the directions should be on the packaging. Next, choose some foods that you like but don't know how to make yourself. Find a simple recipe and pair it down to the bare minimum. For example, I like lasagna so I found a simple recipe that only had a half-dozen ingredients and bought noodles that don't need to be pre-cooked. Mix it up with a fully prepared meal (either order take-out or a frozen pizza or something) once or twice a week. When you get started cooking, it can be easy to miss a key nutrient that you need and having a cheat-day where you eat something you're more used to and can't mess up makes things much easier. When you're starting up, stick to 1-2 cuisine types. Each cuisine has its own staples and commonly used spices, that they combine in different ways. Figure out what makes good staples for your chosen cuisine and how to prepare them (not necessarily from scratch). Find the commonly-used spices and add them to everything, experimenting to see how much you want to add. For example, Italian food uses a lot of pasta or pizza crusts. Fresh pasta tastes much better than boxed pasta, but isn't shelf-stable. Pasta cooking times are short but generally somewhat precise. To cook Italian pasta, you'd want to learn how to tell that pasta is fully cooked. Mexican food uses rice and tortillas instead of pasta and pizza crusts. Pre-cooking your tortillas makes a huge difference. Cooking rice in a rice-cooker is easy, and it's do-able in a pot. The trick to cooking rice in a pot is that, since it's steam-cooked, checking the rice early can really slow down and mess-up the process. The first several times will be slow and messy, but once you figure out how long to wait it's actually quite low effort.
kls 6y ago
First and foremost get a thermometer, until you can trust you experience, cook meat with a thermometer. You will get better results. I am color blind so I use a thermometer to this day. Then start with the basics, as they translate between meat and most non-starch vegetables: Learn to fry. Learn to grill. Learn to broil. learn to roast. learn to stew. breading and frying a mushroom is no different than breading and frying a chicken strip other than some temp adjustments and length of time. Frying is not the healthiest but it can be offset some with better healthier oil. That being said, it covers up a multitude of food sins. As log as you let fried food drain and dry it's hard to mess it up. Second learn the 5 basic tastes salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami and how they blend. Sweet and salty blend, sweet and sour blend to tart, sweet and bitter cancel each other to brine. Sweet will dominate umami, salty will enhance umami, bitter and sour will compound each other. Once you know these it is really easy to taste ingredients and know if they will go together. It also gives you the knowledge of how to undue over flavoring. If it's too sour you can usually offset with sweet to get it to tart. If it is too bitter you can usually balance it with salty and sweet to mute it. Learn to make a starch, take your pick noodles, rice, potatoes etc. Then learn to enhance them with your 5 basic tastes. Learn to make 3-4 vegetables, green beans, broccoli, squash are all really safe and hard to get wrong. They can be bland without enough salt but are pretty safe, they still don't really taste bad if you overcook them. So basically learn to cook meat, a starch and some vegetables and flavor it, you would be surprised how far you can get with a steak, salt and pepper (salty, bitter, umami). Same with a piece of chicken, a lemon, salt and pepper (sour, salty, bitter). Stick to your basic ingredients for flavor, salt, pepper, sugar, lemon, msg or soy sauce (but remember soy sauce brings salty and umami in one package), should cover the basic flavors. Once you have this you can taste other ingreedients and know how they will blend into a flavor profile. Take the chicken example what if we reduce the lemon and pepper and add mustard. Mustard brings both sour and bitter. I honestly never tried it, but I know I could make it into a dish that taste good. Most vegetables can be treated like meat when seasoning, starches not so much stick to salty and umami for now with starches. Once you are comfortable with that, learn to use butter creams, eggs and cheeses in dishes particularly your starches. Once you are comfortable with that expand on spices and learn how to make a mirepoix and the Cajun variant. You would be surprised how much this mix enhances even the most simple dish. This is where you level up, people will talk about how good you cook when you get to this basic level of cooking. At this point you will have the knowledge to decide if you want to keep going or if you are comfortable with your skills. You will be able to create a decent meal no matter the ingredients you have on hand at this point. From here it is really if you want to get into more nuanced disciplines of cooking e.g bread baking, BBQ, sous vide, etc. If you get your meat to temp without overcooking, have a good handle on the basic tastes, can make a handful of vegetables and a starch, you will have a good foundation. This can be achieved in 2-3 months of cooking at least 2 times a week.

diehunde 6y ago

That would be true if by cooking you mean boiling some pasta for 10 minutes or eating some scrabble eggs. That's hardly cooking.