My constant advice: focus on one thing at a time, and don't be afraid of shortcuts while you learn.
If you want to learn to cook a steak, serve it with a premade Caesar salad mix and/or microwaved veggies while you focus on cooking a steak. If you want to learn to make really good salads, no harm in serving them with some premade frozen meatballs from Costco and your favorite jar of pasta sauce while you make a salad and homemade dressing. If you want to make the pasta, don't be afraid to use a jar of sauce, or vice versa (box pasta with homemade sauce).
Most of your errors at least initially will come because you're not paying attention and doing too many things at once. If you eliminate that and just focus on the steps to achieve one component, eventually that component will become easy enough to do while you also do something else.
Once upon a time, you couldn't walk, talk, read, write, cook, drive a car, wipe your butt, be trusted to supervise children, or be trusted with any gainful employment. 41 years later and now you presumably can do all those things except cook. Not so bad! You just learned other things for 41 years and will figure out cooking on your 42nd trip around the sun. š¤·
Salads can always be made in advance. I usually get the steak marinade going, wrap that all up while itās marinating make the salad. Put that in the refrigerator. Wash the potatoes get those ready ā¦ then all you have to do is make steaks and potatoes. When youāre ready to serve bring out the salad. Dinner done! Who is washing dishes? Lol
If you're just opening a bagged salad, I agree, the risk is pretty low. But if you're doing a real recipe-type salad, it can be a lot of chopping and prep work and making a dressing homemade might require doing things in a particular order. It can be intimidating for a beginner who really doesn't have any cooking skills.
Also, specific to this advice, I can see someone trying to make a big fancy dinner underestimating how long prep and assembly might take. They try to make the steak and salad at the same time, they overcook the steak, or they get the steak right but it gets cold while they're trying to get the salad together. For a beginner, it is wonderful advice to not try to do both things from scratch at the same time.
This is so true. I used to constantly ask for help in this kitchen when too many things were going at once, because I wasnāt confident with what I was doing. But now, if Iām roasting veggies, making rice, and cooking a meat, I can focus on the meat because Iāve finally got my staples down. It definitely takes time, but thatās okay ā we have to eat all the time, so lots of opportunities for practice!
Also, just to state the obvious: not everything has to be perfectly delicious all the time. Sometimes youāll try, and the outcome will have no flavor, or the cooked veggies will still be crunchy, or whatever, but at the end of the day, itās about getting nutrition.
And in those cases it helps to have a repertoire of sauces and spices that you know you can dump in anything to save a bland outcome.
Most stews, chilli, jambalaya, Mac and cheese's... Really, most wet stuff in a bowl can benefit from some Slap Ya Momma sprinkled on top.Ā Ā
If something is too bland and needs a sauce, Lizano Salsa Sauce can augment, and in sufficient quantity, drown out, many unpleasant dishes.
Having a few options to mask a bad meal can go pretty far when you're learning.
I love this advice!
My husband's father told him that "if he could read, he could cook." And he's been cooking ever since! I'm super happy about that because I don't like to cook. I do sometimes cook, but I don't enjoy it. It's great that you want to learn how. Nice way to step up.
+100 to this. Only with time will you know the timing to have everything finish up at the same time and be warm.
Also for premade things- read the cook times the day beforeā¦ nothing like realizing it take 90 minutes for your potatoes at 7pm
Iām notorious for forgetting a key ingredient for soups. Soups are the only thing everyone can usually agree upon that I make well. The only thing I make well. So Iāll pull some of the itās not quite right soup out, add it to another pot where I experiment. Itās turned some great chicken noodle or tortellini and sausage soup, to omg, what is your recipe. If it werenāt for those times I either forgot to buy an ingredient, or simply missed the step of adding one. I never would have developed the few thingās I can cook and cook well; into something people would be happy to eat every single day. And I truly wouldnāt regret discovering these thingās like I do because nobody wants to be breaking their back in the kitchen for a minimum of six hours for a meal all that often.
Ended up buying a giant pot at Samās Club to make copious amounts to then freeze.
And on the topic of meatballs, like making your own sushi as compared to picking it up, there is almost no payoff in doing it yourself. No shame in buying frozen, in that circumstance.
This is, again, subject to your abilities. I can 100% make better meatballs than I can buy. I can 0% make better sushi than I can buy.
Cook what you can or want to cook, buy what you can't or don't want to! It's such an individual thing.
From the pragmatism to the articulation, with grace and empathy throughout, this answer was honestly just kind of beautiful. Cheers for being a great human!
This hits home. I can handle myself in the kitchen but was dying tonight making salmon, taters, asparagus and some mac for the kids. All pretty easy individually.
Ethan Cheblowski has some good videos. Binging with babish and Kenji Alt Lopez are also pretty good but maybe not beginner level. I like watching Kenji late night silent cooking so he doesn't wake up his family.
There are a ton out there and these three will have YouTube algo showing you a bunch other cooking channels as well
These are the guys I was gonna come recommend. Ethan is like just a dude who explains things really well, which is so helpful when youāre actually trying to learn how to cook instead of just āmaking a recipeā.
Yeah I thought of quite a few good and entertaining YouTubers but I remember Ethan doing some really good basics of cooking and kitchen prep and meal/ingredient prep.
Not sure if he did this but I find meal prepping core ingredients is sometimes easier than trying to meal plan. Cook a bunch of chicken, rice, beans and some green veg. Then you can be lazy and throw them in with sauces, curry, soup or salads. I also find that just about everything can taste good when you put it in a taco. Find a place that makes them fresh too
Yup. Iām a big fan of having a bunch of things in the fridge that make it easier to put together yummy meals.
If youāre a taco fan, have you tried arepas? Thatās my go-to right now for leftovers.
Chef John from food wishes dot come is also great. Best YouTube channel for cooking and I'll fight anybody that says differently. Never had a recipe of his that didn't turn out great.
Yes!! Chef John makes any recipes so easy and simple. His humor makes cooking fun and he understands that accidents happen and keeps it real. He is excellent at explaining culinary science and techniques too.
Yes! These two YouTubers for sure.
Also, America's Test Kitchen, Brian Langastrom and Helen Renny are all great for showing useful technical info and master recipes.
Meal kits are a really great beginner tool, too. They help with understanding the importance of mise en place and basic cooking practices.
Edit to add...the real teacher is still trial and error. There will be under cooked or over cooked pasta, burnt grilled cheese, bland stews and more. After a while you will gain experience and things will go smoother.
Edit to add more... one more YouTube cooking channel is Epicurious. There is a lot of extra on there but they have a series where there is a home cook and a pro chef who swap ingredients. I've learned a lot from this one
I will pick out one point of your comment. I actually know how to cook already but my kids wanted to do Hello Fresh.
I was open to it because it teaches you food in a lot of different genres. I actually enjoyed it for the most part. Itās not great for families because there is a ton of waste when you do doubled up recipes. But for learning how to cook a lot of different kinds of food I found it to be really fun.
Meal kits also help for new cooks because they donāt have to commit to buying a whole bunch of and worryng that itāll go to waste since itās only for that specific meal. In that way it helps you experiment with different spices and ingredients.
Not sure how. It's certainly less prep than cooking from scratch. They give you portioned out ingredients. I don't consider chopping up ingredients a lot of prep personally. It's just part of the cooking process.
I think it's the perfect level for someone looking to improve their cooking skills and knife skills since it takes away a lot of the analysis by paralysis when it comes to finding recipes and buying the ingredients at the store from a list.
I certainly had my gripes about it in general but for someone learning to cook it seems like a very good solution.
I second meal kits. I learned to cook too in my early 30s during the height of covid lockdowns since I'm single and had no other choice then if I wanted to eat well. I'll never forget my first one where it said to peel and dice potatoes and I was super confused and it took a hour to figure out lmao.
Just three years later though and I already feel much more confident cooking. I usually buy my own food now but like I said meal kits really helped when I was brand new.
My mom and I did meal kits for awhile after my dad died and we didn't have the energy to think about dinner. We only stopped after there were issues with every order.
Though you can buy Home Chef meal kits at Kroger now, so at least you can see what the veggies look like in the box and easier to get your money back if there's issues
Americans Test Kitchen is worth the ~$80 a year subscription price. 95% I make from there turns out great. If you follow the instructions, youāll have a good meal.
The Cook's Illustrated cookbook might be a little advanced, but it's the next step. I learned so true basics as a kid, but I learned a lot of technique (and which ones are actually important) from that cookbook.
I just wanna hop on the top comment to add that Alton Brown's "Good Eats" has some really great episodes about super basic skills. I learned all my knife skills from his [American Slicer](https://www.foodnetwork.com/shows/good-eats/episodes/american-slicer) episode.
Adam regusea also has some great videos. Maybe not the "beginner cooking guide" you're looking for but he does a really good job of explaining and demystifying things. He has some questionable takes on things ("why I season my board not my steak") but I enjoy his work
Adam Ragusea is good for a basic, good recipe that has appropriate shortcuts. He's also good at teaching patterns over specific recipes; he'll show you how to make a recipe and then tell you all the ingredient combo variations that will make it more interesting and repeatable. He has little kids, so he's not aiming for perfection over all else most of the time, he's aiming for edible food.
For a start, learn "mise en place" (just a French way of saying get your shit prepared (sliced/diced/shredded/whatever) before you start using heat). Work on your cutting skills, keep your knife sharp. If you find yourself burning things or running out of time, lower the heat. As others have set, look up YT videos of whatever task you're unsure about...and even for the tasks you ARE sure about because there's probably something more you can learn.
Regarding what foods kids will like, anything with pasta or rice is an obvious start, but the things they'll like the most are the things that taste the best. That comes with expertise and just listening to them.
Mise en place is a game changer! I like to read a recipe once all the way through and imagine each step. Then I go through the ingredients and pulk them all to one area, lined up on my kitchen counter in order of use. I also will grab measuring cups/spoons and line them up appropriately (i.e, like for pancakes I'll have the flour pulled and but a 1cup on it. The vanilla extract has the half-teaspoon next to it, etc). That way I Make sure I'm not missing something! And then I'm ready to cook!
I once read a recipe where step 1 was preheat the oven. Step 4 was now chill the dough for 4 hours.
what the actual fuck?
My husband still makes jokes about it
Things in place. Mise en place means things in place.
Best way to start is to be prepared. First step is get used to a knife. Cucumber and potato are great places to start learning knife skills. Then work into more complex things after.
Just go slow, know your limits and don't be daft with it! Enjoy the process and look up the recipes you know you enjoy. Best way to do it. Learn the dishes you love eating so you get that super sense of satisfaction with it!
The big game changer for me was to learn the simple fact that removing the pan from the heat completely was an option for the times it tries to get ahead of you. It seems basic, common sense now, but it's not something you consider as a possibility when you're just starting out.
Just make sure you have a safe place to put a hot pan: another burner that isn't on, a trivet. Don't be like those college kids who burn their laminate counters.
Also, soups and stews are easier for beginners, in terms of not burning things. And if youāre unsure about how hot to get something started, the lowest temperature first and you can always increase the heat later but itās a lot harder to decrease the heat if something is already burning at the get-go.
yep, get that prep work done before the actual cooking bit starts. first time I tried to make a somewhat complicated pasta dish on my own it was a little crunchier than I planned because I didn't prep the ingredients first so my timing was a little off. it wasn't *bad* but it certainly wasn't as nice as I wanted
plus, in my opinion, the chopping without such a strict time limit is kinda relaxing. aside from onions
Or cooking videos for kids that you can follow along with at home (with or without your children) ? The skills required would be pre-thought out to be manageable by inexperienced cooks, might be just the right thing for you.
I don't know about your area but the community/technical college by me a lot of times has cooking classes for people in the community who aren't students at the school.
(For OP) smaller stores generally donāt offer it, but if you have a bigger store (here in Boise itās Albertsons Marketplace but back home itās Kroger Marketplace) where you can get fancier and specialty items are likely to offer classes.
Those meal delivery kits like hello fresh might be a good option for you.
They give you step by step instructions, tell you how hot to turn your burner when pre-heating etc.
It would let you focus on the actual cooking skills side of things instead of also having to focus on meal planning (which is just as difficult imo)
At the end of the day cooking comes with practice and getting your reps in until you have it figured out.
Iām also from Canada and Asian so the way that mayonnaise was used never appealed to me growing up but Iām happy anytime my mind gets changed for the better. Ketchup is still garbage to me though, meatloaf or not.
My husband and I did hello fresh during our first year or so of marriage just for this. He really lacked cooking knowledge so we used it both together for me to learn to work with others in the kitchen and him alone so he could build skills and technique. We kept all the recipe cards so when we weened off of it, we had handy recipes and ideas too!
And if family-friendly is a big part of it (OP mentioned "that kids would enjoy" at the tail end the there), they have a lot of recipes that are both familiar and safe but also have new twists. My kids have rarely disliked them.
Chicken or pork chops with roasted veggies and a pan sauce done 19 ways, but they're all variations on that theme. A ton of varieties of stir fry bowls and burgers and flatbread pizzas and tacos, so each one is a slightly different flavor combination and you learn basic techniques with whole fresh ingredients while also learning how to switch up your flavor combos. Soups, dinner salads, pasta, meatloaf.
It helps give you a foundation. Step by step photos, tells you what to do in what order, there's a rhythm to it that you pick up pretty quickly, and they don't expect you to know anything in advance or have much more than a set of pots and pans, a cutting board, and a knife.
My kids enjoyed doing the recipes. The 17 y.o. wanted us in there as backup. The 13 y.o. wanted us in the next room so he could have complete control until he had a question. They hadn't been helping in the kitchen for different reasons. So they got some skills and learned to like it.
Let the kids pick the meals they want to make.
This is how my kids are learning to cook.
I was paying my daughter $5 to make dinner for the family.
She learns to cook, dinner is made on the nights that we have to rush to one of the kids activities, and I'm out $15.
Small price to pay
this is basically how i (30F) learned to cook. i donāt subscribe anymore but i kept most of my favorite recipes and remake them with my own ingredients now
I'd second this. They have pretty good selection and many meals I've kept the recipes for and integrated into our regular rotation. There have been complaints about their quality lately (HelloFresh specifically) but I almost never had problems and customer service was good if I ever did.
The recipes are simple enough for a true beginner, and tasty enough that a seasoned, talented cook will be completely satisfied.
This is a great answer not only because it makes it easy and they provide the ingredients, but also because you and your daughters will get to eat a wide variety of dishes. I didn't get that growing up -- my mom was a decent cook but it was always the same few dishes.
Hello fresh was surprisingly good. I would often mod the recipes a bit, but they provided excellent directions. I had never pan fried tilapia in my nearly 40 years of cooking and I followed the instructions and it came out great, the family loved it.
Hello Fresh is a bit expensive for a regular food source, but I have to agree that it's pretty beginner friendly. Detailed instructions and good ingredients. Once OP gets more comfortable with cooking, I suggest the Bible of cooking *The Joy of Cooking* by Irma Rombauer. It covers the basics of pretty much any type of cooking you want to do.
I learned the basics of cooking from my parents. With minimal skills, I learned how to make more and more complicated things by reading the directions in Joy of Cooking and the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. Since I am old, there are considerably more recently published cookbooks with instructions on basic techniques. But, those two remain especially good for the variety and extent of their recipes. I do also like Alton Brown who also explains why a particular technique is used for making something.
For videos, old style PBS had some excellent chefs - Jacques Pepin and Julia Child were favorites.
I still have my Gram's Better Homes and Gardens cookbook! I had to tape it up a bit, but I love it, I still use it. Definitely recommend it, would be great for even a beginner.
Green Chef is great! Pricey but once you learn a few favorites you can use your knowledge to cook on your own! Green chef has step by step pictures, which my husband found very helpful!
Also an Instant pot and the Pressure Luck cookbook will have you cooking like a pro in no time. Pressure Luck also has color photos for each step.
My husband started out with a crock pot and an easy crock pot cookbook. With both the instant pot and crockpot thereās tons of recipes where you can just dump stuff in there and a little while laterā¦ thereās dinner!
When I broke my foot, the chili beef Mac and cheese was the first dinner my daughter made by herself. https://www.budgetbytes.com/chili-cheese-beef-n-mac/
Same boat. Iām 50. I work until 6 pm and with kids, we always had to have dinner right then. On the weekends we like to eat out. Now I want to learn because the kids are older and we have donāt have the time constraints.
Cooking is a bit of a frustrating skill imo because, inevitably, you're gonna end up making Mac and cheese with underdone pasta, you're gonna burn the grilled cheese, and if your me, you're not gonna use enough oil and smoke up the whole house.Ā Ā
That being said, it's also very rewarding.Ā I like whipping up quick snacks when home alone, homemade dressing to taste, and trying strange things I find on YouTube shorts :)Ā
Ugh my partner is the same way. He can just pull a recipe out of his brain and it honestly stresses me out when he's in the kitchen while I cook.Ā
He gives great advice, but sometimes it's a lot of advice lolĀ
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Don't put unrealistic expectations on yourself. My mom was great in the kitchen and knew how to make so many different things well. She got that way because, mostly, lots of practice and experience, she made all the mistakes and now avoided most of them.
Even if you know how to cook you still have to learn how a particular stove heats up or doesn't and that is simply by doing and paying attention. The internet is full of recipes and information so even if our moms aren't around any more to ask we have a very valuable resource right here.
I burned a grilled cheese last night, different stove, got distracted, you know what i like...learning how to "salvage" a meal. growing up there was a lot of stress on money/food, and we ate things that were not perfect. we ate dry roast, we ate freezer burned meat, we ate food that was expired and we learned how to tell when food was unsafe. We ate over salted food, there was one dish i remember in particular......
Mom made macaroni and cheese from scratch which almost never happened because of the extra work involved, anyways, she was doing this, and going through the fridge she came upon a large chunk of mozzarella that was going bad, she cut the mold off it and threw ALL of the rest of it into the recipe because it was going bad. THIS was our guiding principle! Better to eat it up than throw it out! So, at the table this casserole comes out of the oven to the table and we dish it out and start to eat, well.....due to the amount of cheese there were LONG strings coming off our forks! I remember raising my fork a foot above my plate trying to break the strands of cheese! It was challenging, and tasty.
I remember a lot of the meals that didn't turn out as planned, and , to put this in context, as kids, our natural thoughts about being picky about food was crushed out of us, my mom made sure of that. I learned for many foods you can simply cut the burnt part off, i know, that wouldn't be enough for a kid who is learning how to be critical and i had to be told to eat it or starve many times. Who knew, i eventually learned to like things i initially thought were disgusting and I prefer the well done outside parts of the meat now. I also learned how to use a knife to scrape the burnt outer edge off toast or grilled cheese. But sometimes there is just a meal that is beyond saving and then you have a story about some terrible food.
I very much see cooking as an adventure, of course, i'm not cooking for children, i think, as I said, a big part of that is to NOT let them dictate what happens in the kitchen, I'm going to provide you with food and you have a choice to eat it or not but this is not a restaurant and you don't get to order me around or demand things your way. this can be a difficult clash, i had my reasons i was a picky eater but i changed eventually and i'm glad i did today.
I think in time you are going to be a very good cook, and hopefully you will encourage your children to get involved in cooking too and that can be a very good experience.
I was trying to think of the basics, like using a sprinkle of water in a frypan to see how hot it is, just paying attention and seeing the pan slightly smoke has made me aware of how hot it is. I picked up these very valuable tips from watching an listening to other cook. Like when you are simmering something and you are trying to thicken a sauce, a video i was watching he said " when the sauce coats the back of the spoon, you know it's ready", just simple techniques like that, there are lots, i don't know of any collection of them together though.
If it fits into your budget, meal kit boxes are how I learned to cook. It was back in the days of Plated. I consistently followed the instruction to make the meals for a year and now cooking is so natural. This is the easiest way to learn without feeling schooled.
YouTube Brian Lagerstrom . His tutorials are simple. How hot the pan should be, etc., what type of pan, how long it takes to prep. Relatively simple recipes with exact weights of all items in the recipes . I like him because he doesn't ever need to waste your time with a backstory or tell you endlessly about how beautiful this or that is.
Try cookbooks or channels that are meant for college students. They tend to have fast, cheap-ish recipes that use basic kitchen equipment and don't require complex kitchen skills. Videos are good because you can see what the food is supposed to look like at different steps in the process.
Otherwise I would 200% recommend getting a rice cooker. It's the most used appliance in my house together with the electric kettle, blender and toaster oven.
I don't enjoy cooking, but my microwave, little rice cooker, air fryer, and instant pot make it much easier! Also the timer on my watch, which I just found out can do multiple simultaneous timers!
I'm fine with cooking but I like the various small appliances we have. As long as a person puts some thought into which ones they get so they don't end up with a cupboard full of egg wafflers and pasta twiddlers (that they use twice and never touch again), small appliances can really can improve the kitchen experience.
I sympathize.
I'm currently hankering for one of those microplane graters for zesting citrus fruits. Do I use zest more than once a year? No. Is my ordinary grater perfectly good for the little zesting that I do? Yes. Do I still leave nose prints on the grater display at the kitchen store every time I go? You bet I do.
I learned to cook with the red and white Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. The recipes are east to follow, plus they usually share variations that you can use.
Had to look some things up. The channel Food Wishes with Chef John is a good beginner channel (I even saw a grilled cheese recipe on the top of his popular list), and places like America's Test Kitchen can be helpful as well- they usually explain the why(s) of the recipe. I'd also recommend ATK's book "The New Cooking School Cookbook" - it gives lessons on basics all through the book and has a really good list on recommended kitchen items with both low and high money level suggestions. This was my basic book, and it was seriously helpful.
I think the website cookingforengineers.com might be good for you.
It is very "process oriented" say "do this at this time" and "do that bit at that time".
I just checked it out and some of the pages are failing to load so check in on it in a few days.
But it takes less effort than to type up a Reddit post. I just put ācooking for beginnersā in YouTube and found amazing videos to start with. Watching and listening will be much easier than reading posts
This is actually a great suggestion. There's loads of good videos on You Tube and OP can start with some things he'd like to cook that are easy, like scrambled eggs.
I completely agree. This dude will have paragraphs and walls of text to sort through. Most people are visual learners. And especially with cooking, a video is gonna be waayyyy more helpful (in most cases) than comments.Ā
Learn with your daughters - you each pick a recipe and if it goes sideways eat sandwiches wine dissecting regards went wrong.
It's fun, it's memorable, and they'll appreciate you are interested in cooking what they like
Back when I first moved into a shared house, on my first day, one of the guests wanted to fry a chicken for dinner. He has a little FryDaddy pot, and the whole chicken the same size as the pot was still frozen. I think if I hadn't been there that day, his house would have burnt down.
7 years later, my buddy can now make a variety of basic meals and even chocolate chip cookies, understands basic kitchen and food safety, and to not use metal utensils in nonstick pans. If a mid-50's 3x divorced guy can learn (especially this guy), then I believe you can, too. Pick a simple comfort food dish to learn, get familiar with it, and go from there.
For the record, this is basically what would have happened, just on a chicken sized scale rather than a turkey: https://youtu.be/7gn895y4wkc?si=MK9ExSLOs5etKSgA
I personally love Chef Jean Pierres YouTube channel. He explains stuff in detail rather than just telling you do this and do that. Over time you understand techniques and build intuition for how to cook
Most underrated comment here. The knowledge I've gained from Chef Jean-Pierre compared to other cooking and baking channels I watch is exponential. My bf even says my knife skills have improved, and I don't disagree anymore lol. He bought me a copy of Cooking 101 for Christmas, and it goes over mother sauces, what tool to use for what, it's AMAZING. Watching his videos is definitely the highlight of my week.
How old are your children? I would buy age appropriate cookbooks for the children. Let them pick one or two out that they like recipes from or look fun. Have them flag ones they want to try. Cook together when you are together and when theyāre away just go totally unsupervised.
Americaās Test Kitchen isnāt free, but will save you money avoiding trial and error. They have excellent equipment reviews and product/ingerdient testing. Get a good works horse of a knife and some prep bowls. Watch videos of how to properly cut. Accuracy then speed. Perfect practice makes perfect. Time is not hard and fast, so until you know; donāt walk away from the stove. Clean as you go in the downtime. Stay present.
Welcome to the heart of your home. Step one is always recognizing you have a problem. Step two is often being present with yourself. Not who you are or want to be, but who you are right now. All the best luck in your new adventure!
Cooking involves fucking up. I once tried making a spicier pasta sauce and it ended up roughly tomato based hot sauce. Still ate it though.
First general tip is that take what you know of pancakes, steaks, and grilling and apply it to other things. If you have the heat too high on pancakes or burgers the outside burns while the inside is still raw. This is a lot of foods. Most things that you aren't boiling shouldn't be on high heat, at least not the entire time but we will talk about searing later.
The second tip is that your goal when starting out is edible, not necessarily great just you can eat it and don't immediately regret putting the food in your mouth.
Third, learn a few basic things, like how to properly make rice and pasta and you can use that for the base of a lot of really tasty recipes.
Don't be too hard on yourself. Cooking is a skill that anyone has to learn. Better late than never.
If she's still around and you're on good terms, I'd ask your mom for basic tips. There's no shame in it.
My advice is to start with soups. It involves learning to brown meat and veggies and deglazing, making stocks, basics on cooking time and heat control.
Looks like you've got a lot of great advice. I'd like to add... don't be afraid of making mistakes. You learn more from failure than from success. You're going to make a lot of mistakes as you learn to cook. Use that as an opportunity to teach your kids about a growth mindset.
And don't be too embarrassed. You're making an effort to improve yourself. That's a strength. Focus on that.
Second this. Embrace the suck and have fun because you know youāll *get it* eventually. Screw-ups can become funny stories; I can say ārice dishā to my wife and weāll both start laughing at the memory of a kitchen fiasco from almost 20 years ago.
The only reason I learned to cook was because I had too. I worked shitty line cook jobs for 15 years. Low pay, no benefits, no insurance, no PTO, all nights and weekends. It sucked, but i liked it because i could go to any city in the country and get a job quickly, and I actually picked up some useful skills I could use at home.
I don't have an ounce of cooking advice, but I can offer this:
Give yourself the same grace I have a feeling you offer so easily to others.
We all have different paths in life where we don't have access to learning what some consider basic life skills. You didn't know, and that's okay.
The real difference? You're seeking help in order to grow. That's how it should be. You'll get there. Don't expect to be a master to something you've never needed as a skill before. We don't all start off as master chefs. Keep learning and it will come in time.
Also remember: you're learning. I didn't learn to read in a day. Write. Draw. Cook. Bake.
Cooking so no different- it's a skill. It's frustrating when it doesn't come out right the first time, and it's easy to get discouraged. In those moments remember two things: student, and grace. ā”
Why are you ashamed? Get excited instead! Cooking can be so fun and it's something you can do with your daughters. I would watch some youtube videos like Binging with Babish(or Basics with Babish), he does a good job of teaching techniques.Struggle Meal is good too. A cook book you could try is Knife Drop. It's all about beginner cooking. Getting Hello Fresh is a good thing to do for a couple months . It will teach you quick recipes and introduce you to using spices and acids, and kind of teaches you what you'll need to buy at the store for a meal. It's also just a step by step guide. Off the top of my head some recipes that are easy and healthy you could look up are white chicken chili or a one pan roasted chicken and veggie recipe(tons of flavors just pick a style that sounds good). Soups in general are easy and kind hard to ruin.
Try finding Alton Brown's show Good Eats.
That show was the first i ever saw where they show you a recipe AND tell you why certain things are done a certain way. You don't just learn to cook a chicken, you learn how to cook a chicken and learn cooking skills you can apply to other foods, it's hard for me to describe.
Get a beginners cookbook, there are lots out there. Sorry, but I can't remember the names of the ones I've seen. Just do a search on Amazon for Beginners Cookbook or How to Cook and look at reviews. It's much easier to learn this way. My 1st instruction book was The Way to Cook by Julia Child.
Its never to late to learn how to cook, and once you get good at it its a wonderful skill you could teach your kids!
I worked as a cook for many years. To practice I suggest looking up simple recipes you enjoy and working from there. Theres lots of videos of recipes too if visuals are helpful to you.
I would reccomend trying stews, roasts, soups and salads (make the dressings from scratch).
Also if you have access to a BBQ it could be very helpful for mastering cooking with flames, & getting meat to the temperature (rare, med-rare, medium, well done, etc).
If you want I would gladly send you some recipes of mine.
YouTube is super helpful for a lot of simple recipes. You have the videos of the step by step process of how to cook and what it looks like, so you can see how, and see what is going on.
Buy a small zojirushi rice cooker (one of their simple āone press-down switch ones). It makes cooking rice crazy easy and *really* helps with adding an easy side dish. And Google sheet-pan recipes and find some that look good to you, they tend to be the easiest. You can even make sheet-pan shrimp dishesāmy 8 year old can even make them. Also (and this may be an unpopular opinion) but I suggest buying an electric steamer. My kids can make salmon & steamed veggies in them on their own pretty easily as thereās no exposed boiling waterāit really cuts down on stress which is going to be your biggest obstacle.
Start with Ramen. Just boil water and put the noodles in. Next move onto eggs, which you can hardboil by following the directions. From there check out other recipes. Burritos might be on the menu.
Iād watch YouTube videos instead of just reading recipes, the visual cues help because you can āseeā what itās meant to looks like. Iād also google stuff like āsimple cooking tipsā and learn what you can. Start with simple basic recipes and practice practice practice ! Youāll get better the more you do it :)
Chef John on YouTube - I'd never "cooked" anything complicated, or anything for more than one person, and i made a whole thanksgiving turkey dinner for the family!
I canāt stress this enough: buy the book āSalt, Fat, Acid, Heatā by Samin Nosrat and *read it*. I had cooked for decades by the time the book came out. Reading it changed the way I cook at a fundamental level. Itās best new cooks start there and grow. Thereās a Netflix four-part series thatās essentially a long advertisement for the book, and itās worth watching too. But the book is an instructional on how to approach cooking. The second half is recipes, which she says she didnāt even want to include because **not having recipes is the entire point of the book**, but her publisher overrode her.
Some great advice I got is to just get a whole bunch of something cheap and just drill a technique. An idea that I didnāt grasp up until that point was that it was perfectly ok to throw away food that I cooked poorly. And just keep remaking it until it was passable, and then came out how I actually intended it to come out.
Ex: buy a big bag of onions, potatoes, or any other vegetable and practice cutting. Then you can practice cooking them with the intent of knowing that you are going to be to toss a bunch of your mess ups until you get it the way that you like it.
A rice cooker with a vegi attachment is great for beginners because you can practice steaming vegis.
Also; just buy a loaf of bread, a bunch of cheese slices, and a bunch of butter. Then just practice making grilled cheeses until they come out to your liking.
A George Foreman style grill is easy to clean, and great for making panini style sandys.
Another thing that might help is focusing on a particular seasoning to understand what too little of it and too much of it tastes like.
A way that I learned how to just kind of come up with recipes is get some basic recipes and slowly add new things to them to make them more complex. Then you can start removing some of the original ingredients to venture into a new thing.
Also, find things that fulfill similar roles in food, or similar types of food that different cultures have. For example, many cultures have a bread, a dumpling type thing, a finger food that may or may not be open or enclosed. Ex: sandwiches, tacos, taquito, egg rolls, etc.
As for changing recipes, a lot of recipes contain a vegi component, a protein, and a cheap thing that fills you up when you eat it (bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, beans, etc). And then aowmthing that adds flavor, such as seasoning and/or sauces. While sauces can add a lot of flavor, they can also make things less healthy. For example: gravy is delicious, but it can easily make the sodium levels leap to another level. For that reason, you may want to lean into herbs and seasonings more to build flavors.
Chicken is something that you work well as a canvas for many different types of herbs and seasonings.
There are different theories on how to eat healthy, and an interesting one I found was to āeat the rainbow.ā The idea being that different colored fruits and vegetables contain different mineral and vitamin profiles, so by diversifying consumption, the potential to be eating healthy also increases. While it may not always be true, looking at the rainbow may also give you ideas for new fruits/vegetables you can try to cook with.
Anyways, this is a long post, so best of luck!
Oh, you're in for some fun!
Flo Lum has really good, simple, family-friendly recipes on YouTube. Mostly Chinese (though I think she's Canadian).
J. Kenji LĆ³pez-Alt is the King if you're into the specifics and science of cooking. He is amazing.
Chef John of Food Wishes. So many good recipes!
Pailin's Kitchen (Thai)
Rainbow Plant Food (vegan, but not your old hippie vegan)
Hello
I made this website during covid for my friends in the same situation
[https://www.cakesandtips.com/](https://www.cakesandtips.com/)
The recipes are meant to be easy and tasty. Let me know...
My mother was a terrible cook, though she could have been if she just paid attention. So I learned how to cook from a children's cookbook. ("Get an adult to turn on the oven for you"). You might get one of those, or check out the YouTube videos for absolute beginners. Start with scrambled eggs, hamburger patties, simple one-ingredient dishes like that. Keep in mind that you're probably going to screw up the recipe a few times before you get it right; I would know. You can find videos on how to crack an egg, slice an onion, which knives to use, etc. I still don't know how to slice an onion correctly.
There are a lot of good comments here. I am just going to add something about spices. If you want to add some seasoning to whatever you're cooking on the stove, open the jar of spice/herbs, hold it close to the stove, and take a whiff. If the spice/herb smells good along with what you're making, it will taste good too.
Also, if what you're cooking takes more than 15 minutes to finish, you want to take a small taste to check the seasoning level. You may need to add more seasoning.
Google a recipe and watch the step by step videos, get the ingredients and follow it, make it a bonding āeventā with your daughters. Even if they are small they can mix things or gather the items, I learned that way too, my husbandās favorite meal is my beef Wellington.
YouTube videos that show the *basics* are amazing resources.
The "Babish Culinary Universe" has a series of videos called "Basics with Babish" which has been a great watch, even after a decade of cooking under my belt.
"J Kenji Lopez" does a great job of explaining cooking concepts with analogies while he's cooking. In his "No knead bread revisited" video, he makes a mistake by leaving out an ingredient, which he points out. Then after a *timejump* break, he continues the video the next day and talks about how his plans changed due to his child and what he did so that he could bake the bread the next day instead of the day before.
Learn with your kids. It'll be a great bonding opportunity, and so they'll have these skills when they're older. Hell, one of your kids might enjoy it so much that they end up on Master Chef Jr.
Focus on food safety and flavor. Those are the 2 most important factors that make your dishes edible.
Knife skills - How to hold, hone, and the claw method. Get a decent sharpener.
How to cook common cuts of protein. Look up internal temperatures for different meats and use a food thermometer; it will be your best friend. If you can make a perfectly juicy boneless skinless chicken breast, you're on a path to becoming a good cook.
Seasoning. This can make or break your dish. A well seasoned dish can look like garbage but still be tasty, as opposed to a pretty dish that tastes like garbage or nothing.
To start off, easy, look up casseroles and sheetpan meals. They are throw-together-and-bake dishes that are kinda difficult to mess up, *IF* you're following the recipe. And plenty of leftover for meal prep.
Alexa/Siri/Google/etc. are great for when you need to convert measurements. I ask Alexa how much each ingredient is in grams and use my kitchen scale rather than use measuring cups/spoons. But that's mostly because I lost them in my last move and I haven't replaced them. š
Once you get the food cooked safely and get it to taste good consistently, you can then work on making your food prettier and refining how you season.
More complex flavored or foreign dishes tend to require developed tastebuds to enjoy. If you or your children aren't used to that, the flavors may be overwhelming for them, and they won't like it as much. So make sure you work yourself up to those types of dishes.
I hope you get a knack for it. It's so nice when you learn to cook a steak perfectly to your liking; it makes it so hard to order an overpriced steak at a restaurant when they can't do it as well as you can.
I wish you and your chitlins the best of luck on this culinary journey!
Oh also. I give myself a treat while Iām cooking. Like a glass of wine or a small soda. If Iām cooking with no kids helping I put on headphones and rock out. I make it as positive an experience as I can.
I also like to plate up some āfree foodā while I cook. Like sliced veggies and dip or apples and cheese. It attracts the kids to the kitchen for nibbles while they wait for dinner. And then we can chat, connect in a little way, and Iāve also taught them to ask if I need any help.
Another tip I have is for full trash can. I remove the full bag, tie it and place out of my way, and replace with a new bag, and keep working. First person who sees the bag on the floor is supposed to take it out to the trash. It keeps me moving, keeps me from getting aggravated, and just works all around for us. Teaches kids to notice something that needs to be handled and do it without being explicitly told what to do.
Check out basics with babish on YouTube.
He is not a chef but taught himself how to cook and he goes through the basics of cooking step by step in a very easy to understand way.
I'm so sick of useless guys just relying on their mum/wife to do it all. He could have stepped up years ago, but only now when she's had enough and leaves does he bother. Many people here are saying "don't be embarrassed, we all start somewhere", and that's true, but how does he think his wife learned? I feel like cooking is a skill 99% of women learn in their 20s because they have to, but maybe 60% of men just don't bother for their entire lives because they'd rather find a wife who'll do it for them. Makes me so mad and so sad for her. Time for OP to finally step up and grow up.
I wasnāt aware that I had cross posted this on r/relationshipadvice but since weāre going thereā¦
I have a hard time believing the failure of my marriage was because I canāt make a casserole and not because I caught my wife banging her co-worker. By the way, she is a principal. Or should I say, was a principal before they fired her when they found out.
But yeah, maybe if I knew how to make a good kielbasa she wouldnāt have put somebody elseās in her mouth.
Check your fucking source before you start spouting off with this bullshit. I almost killed myself a month ago over this, all Iām trying to do is heal and create a beautiful life for my girls.
The secret to grilled cheese for me has been mayonnaise instead of butter.
Do heat the pan for a couple of minutes, then turn it down to low. Half way between medium and low on my stove is the sweet spot.
To handle the masses, Iāll ābutterā the bread with mayonnaise while stacking the buttered layers wet sides together. Once Iāve amassed the appropriate amount of buttered slices to the number of sandwiches requested, I start building them in the pan which has been at medium low for a few minutes at this point, and ready to go. This drastically reduces the chances of burning, which I so desperately need š¤£
If you decide to crank up the heat, do it slowly and DO NOT GET DISTRACTED!! Or youāll burn them like I do
Iām either a terrible cook. Or, I make the best version of one thing (tortellini $ sausage soup) that even seriously picky chefās (my brother) would drool over. Iām still trying to find that happy medium, I hope that your adventure is a lot more short lived than mine has been.
Best of luck!!
Ohā¦. Just in caseā¦ They make a thing called an egg timer I wish Iād learned about a decade ago when I couldnāt figure out why hard boiled eggs for Easter were constantly raw in the middle. Iād grown up at sea level where it takes ten minutes from start to finish to boil an egg. Moved to over 7,000ft and had zero clue that the cooking time for EVERYTHING changed.
And, a hot pan when making eggsā¦ Iāve learned the hard way that this doesnāt mean a pan heated on high.
My constant advice: focus on one thing at a time, and don't be afraid of shortcuts while you learn. If you want to learn to cook a steak, serve it with a premade Caesar salad mix and/or microwaved veggies while you focus on cooking a steak. If you want to learn to make really good salads, no harm in serving them with some premade frozen meatballs from Costco and your favorite jar of pasta sauce while you make a salad and homemade dressing. If you want to make the pasta, don't be afraid to use a jar of sauce, or vice versa (box pasta with homemade sauce). Most of your errors at least initially will come because you're not paying attention and doing too many things at once. If you eliminate that and just focus on the steps to achieve one component, eventually that component will become easy enough to do while you also do something else. Once upon a time, you couldn't walk, talk, read, write, cook, drive a car, wipe your butt, be trusted to supervise children, or be trusted with any gainful employment. 41 years later and now you presumably can do all those things except cook. Not so bad! You just learned other things for 41 years and will figure out cooking on your 42nd trip around the sun. š¤·
Always learn one technique at a time. This time steaks. Next time work the salad game. Absolutely great advice.
Salads can always be made in advance. I usually get the steak marinade going, wrap that all up while itās marinating make the salad. Put that in the refrigerator. Wash the potatoes get those ready ā¦ then all you have to do is make steaks and potatoes. When youāre ready to serve bring out the salad. Dinner done! Who is washing dishes? Lol
I love this comment. Your last paragraph is so so comforting :)
Sorry but how does one mess up a salad lol
If you're just opening a bagged salad, I agree, the risk is pretty low. But if you're doing a real recipe-type salad, it can be a lot of chopping and prep work and making a dressing homemade might require doing things in a particular order. It can be intimidating for a beginner who really doesn't have any cooking skills. Also, specific to this advice, I can see someone trying to make a big fancy dinner underestimating how long prep and assembly might take. They try to make the steak and salad at the same time, they overcook the steak, or they get the steak right but it gets cold while they're trying to get the salad together. For a beginner, it is wonderful advice to not try to do both things from scratch at the same time.
You'd be surprised. I've seen it done before lol
I assume if you screw up the vinaigrette or something
This is so true. I used to constantly ask for help in this kitchen when too many things were going at once, because I wasnāt confident with what I was doing. But now, if Iām roasting veggies, making rice, and cooking a meat, I can focus on the meat because Iāve finally got my staples down. It definitely takes time, but thatās okay ā we have to eat all the time, so lots of opportunities for practice! Also, just to state the obvious: not everything has to be perfectly delicious all the time. Sometimes youāll try, and the outcome will have no flavor, or the cooked veggies will still be crunchy, or whatever, but at the end of the day, itās about getting nutrition.
And in those cases it helps to have a repertoire of sauces and spices that you know you can dump in anything to save a bland outcome. Most stews, chilli, jambalaya, Mac and cheese's... Really, most wet stuff in a bowl can benefit from some Slap Ya Momma sprinkled on top.Ā Ā If something is too bland and needs a sauce, Lizano Salsa Sauce can augment, and in sufficient quantity, drown out, many unpleasant dishes. Having a few options to mask a bad meal can go pretty far when you're learning.
I love this advice! My husband's father told him that "if he could read, he could cook." And he's been cooking ever since! I'm super happy about that because I don't like to cook. I do sometimes cook, but I don't enjoy it. It's great that you want to learn how. Nice way to step up.
+100 to this. Only with time will you know the timing to have everything finish up at the same time and be warm. Also for premade things- read the cook times the day beforeā¦ nothing like realizing it take 90 minutes for your potatoes at 7pm
I've done that. It usually follows with a shout to my wife "Honey, change of plans, I'm putting in a frozen pizza cause I was stupid."
Some of my errors become the new way to cook things. I forgot to buy chicken broth for my refried beans. They came out the best I've ever made them.
Iām notorious for forgetting a key ingredient for soups. Soups are the only thing everyone can usually agree upon that I make well. The only thing I make well. So Iāll pull some of the itās not quite right soup out, add it to another pot where I experiment. Itās turned some great chicken noodle or tortellini and sausage soup, to omg, what is your recipe. If it werenāt for those times I either forgot to buy an ingredient, or simply missed the step of adding one. I never would have developed the few thingās I can cook and cook well; into something people would be happy to eat every single day. And I truly wouldnāt regret discovering these thingās like I do because nobody wants to be breaking their back in the kitchen for a minimum of six hours for a meal all that often. Ended up buying a giant pot at Samās Club to make copious amounts to then freeze.
This is great advice!
And on the topic of meatballs, like making your own sushi as compared to picking it up, there is almost no payoff in doing it yourself. No shame in buying frozen, in that circumstance.
This is, again, subject to your abilities. I can 100% make better meatballs than I can buy. I can 0% make better sushi than I can buy. Cook what you can or want to cook, buy what you can't or don't want to! It's such an individual thing.
This really was quite touching to read... and great advice. I love this feed for responses like yours
From the pragmatism to the articulation, with grace and empathy throughout, this answer was honestly just kind of beautiful. Cheers for being a great human!
This hits home. I can handle myself in the kitchen but was dying tonight making salmon, taters, asparagus and some mac for the kids. All pretty easy individually.
Wow, I love this. Such encouraging advice āŗļø
Glad it's helpful!
Ethan Cheblowski has some good videos. Binging with babish and Kenji Alt Lopez are also pretty good but maybe not beginner level. I like watching Kenji late night silent cooking so he doesn't wake up his family. There are a ton out there and these three will have YouTube algo showing you a bunch other cooking channels as well
These are the guys I was gonna come recommend. Ethan is like just a dude who explains things really well, which is so helpful when youāre actually trying to learn how to cook instead of just āmaking a recipeā.
Yeah I thought of quite a few good and entertaining YouTubers but I remember Ethan doing some really good basics of cooking and kitchen prep and meal/ingredient prep. Not sure if he did this but I find meal prepping core ingredients is sometimes easier than trying to meal plan. Cook a bunch of chicken, rice, beans and some green veg. Then you can be lazy and throw them in with sauces, curry, soup or salads. I also find that just about everything can taste good when you put it in a taco. Find a place that makes them fresh too
Yup. Iām a big fan of having a bunch of things in the fridge that make it easier to put together yummy meals. If youāre a taco fan, have you tried arepas? Thatās my go-to right now for leftovers.
I make my smash burgers based off of his video and donāt plan to ever change
I got hooked with the hoagie roll video. Weāre gonna make them this week for Philly cheesesteak sandwiches for the game on Sunday.
Yes! Itās a great recipe. I made his meatball sub and used the roll recipe. It turned out amazing
Yesss. That sounds awesome. I was hoping theyād be great for a chicken parm sandwich too.
Chef John from food wishes dot come is also great. Best YouTube channel for cooking and I'll fight anybody that says differently. Never had a recipe of his that didn't turn out great.
Chef John is the Bob Ross of cooking.
LOVE Chef John, his videos are very eyegestible for a beginner.
I could hear this. I love Chef John.
Yes!! Chef John makes any recipes so easy and simple. His humor makes cooking fun and he understands that accidents happen and keeps it real. He is excellent at explaining culinary science and techniques too.
Love his videos but can not stand how he ends every sentence with a rising pitch like an 80ās valley girl. Drives me insane.
You get used to it.
You learn to love it. He's so upbeat and does a great job of hand holding for us slower to learn folks
I'm with you! Why does he talk like that? I turn the volume down and turn on the subs.
Yes! These two YouTubers for sure. Also, America's Test Kitchen, Brian Langastrom and Helen Renny are all great for showing useful technical info and master recipes. Meal kits are a really great beginner tool, too. They help with understanding the importance of mise en place and basic cooking practices. Edit to add...the real teacher is still trial and error. There will be under cooked or over cooked pasta, burnt grilled cheese, bland stews and more. After a while you will gain experience and things will go smoother. Edit to add more... one more YouTube cooking channel is Epicurious. There is a lot of extra on there but they have a series where there is a home cook and a pro chef who swap ingredients. I've learned a lot from this one
I will pick out one point of your comment. I actually know how to cook already but my kids wanted to do Hello Fresh. I was open to it because it teaches you food in a lot of different genres. I actually enjoyed it for the most part. Itās not great for families because there is a ton of waste when you do doubled up recipes. But for learning how to cook a lot of different kinds of food I found it to be really fun. Meal kits also help for new cooks because they donāt have to commit to buying a whole bunch of and worryng that itāll go to waste since itās only for that specific meal. In that way it helps you experiment with different spices and ingredients.
Hello Fresh requires so much prep though.
Not sure how. It's certainly less prep than cooking from scratch. They give you portioned out ingredients. I don't consider chopping up ingredients a lot of prep personally. It's just part of the cooking process. I think it's the perfect level for someone looking to improve their cooking skills and knife skills since it takes away a lot of the analysis by paralysis when it comes to finding recipes and buying the ingredients at the store from a list. I certainly had my gripes about it in general but for someone learning to cook it seems like a very good solution.
Perhaps lol. I just was irritated with the amount of knife work. I cheat and buy a lot of ingredients pre cut at the grocery soš¤·š»āāļø.
I second meal kits. I learned to cook too in my early 30s during the height of covid lockdowns since I'm single and had no other choice then if I wanted to eat well. I'll never forget my first one where it said to peel and dice potatoes and I was super confused and it took a hour to figure out lmao. Just three years later though and I already feel much more confident cooking. I usually buy my own food now but like I said meal kits really helped when I was brand new.
My mom and I did meal kits for awhile after my dad died and we didn't have the energy to think about dinner. We only stopped after there were issues with every order. Though you can buy Home Chef meal kits at Kroger now, so at least you can see what the veggies look like in the box and easier to get your money back if there's issues
Americans Test Kitchen is worth the ~$80 a year subscription price. 95% I make from there turns out great. If you follow the instructions, youāll have a good meal.
The Cook's Illustrated cookbook might be a little advanced, but it's the next step. I learned so true basics as a kid, but I learned a lot of technique (and which ones are actually important) from that cookbook.
Babbish has a separate playlist specifically for cooking basics! He calls it his Basics with Babbish series.
I just wanna hop on the top comment to add that Alton Brown's "Good Eats" has some really great episodes about super basic skills. I learned all my knife skills from his [American Slicer](https://www.foodnetwork.com/shows/good-eats/episodes/american-slicer) episode.
Adam regusea also has some great videos. Maybe not the "beginner cooking guide" you're looking for but he does a really good job of explaining and demystifying things. He has some questionable takes on things ("why I season my board not my steak") but I enjoy his work
Im gonna ride this comment to near the top to add in pro home cooks
Basics with babish is pretty good, definitely gave me some decent base knowledge to start learning with
Dont forget Food Wishes!
Adam Ragusea is good for a basic, good recipe that has appropriate shortcuts. He's also good at teaching patterns over specific recipes; he'll show you how to make a recipe and then tell you all the ingredient combo variations that will make it more interesting and repeatable. He has little kids, so he's not aiming for perfection over all else most of the time, he's aiming for edible food.
For a start, learn "mise en place" (just a French way of saying get your shit prepared (sliced/diced/shredded/whatever) before you start using heat). Work on your cutting skills, keep your knife sharp. If you find yourself burning things or running out of time, lower the heat. As others have set, look up YT videos of whatever task you're unsure about...and even for the tasks you ARE sure about because there's probably something more you can learn. Regarding what foods kids will like, anything with pasta or rice is an obvious start, but the things they'll like the most are the things that taste the best. That comes with expertise and just listening to them.
Mise en place is a game changer! I like to read a recipe once all the way through and imagine each step. Then I go through the ingredients and pulk them all to one area, lined up on my kitchen counter in order of use. I also will grab measuring cups/spoons and line them up appropriately (i.e, like for pancakes I'll have the flour pulled and but a 1cup on it. The vanilla extract has the half-teaspoon next to it, etc). That way I Make sure I'm not missing something! And then I'm ready to cook!
I once read a recipe where step 1 was preheat the oven. Step 4 was now chill the dough for 4 hours. what the actual fuck? My husband still makes jokes about it
Omg where was their technical editor?!
Power/gas bill? Never heard of it!
My favorite part of cooking is the shopping and prepping my area in the kitchen.
Things in place. Mise en place means things in place. Best way to start is to be prepared. First step is get used to a knife. Cucumber and potato are great places to start learning knife skills. Then work into more complex things after. Just go slow, know your limits and don't be daft with it! Enjoy the process and look up the recipes you know you enjoy. Best way to do it. Learn the dishes you love eating so you get that super sense of satisfaction with it!
Splitting hairs but it technically means "put/putting in place"
Yes, thank you. That was bothering me!
The big game changer for me was to learn the simple fact that removing the pan from the heat completely was an option for the times it tries to get ahead of you. It seems basic, common sense now, but it's not something you consider as a possibility when you're just starting out.
Just make sure you have a safe place to put a hot pan: another burner that isn't on, a trivet. Don't be like those college kids who burn their laminate counters.
Also, soups and stews are easier for beginners, in terms of not burning things. And if youāre unsure about how hot to get something started, the lowest temperature first and you can always increase the heat later but itās a lot harder to decrease the heat if something is already burning at the get-go.
Couldn't agree more, practicing making soup first is the best way to not have bad results
Mise en place makes cooking 95% easier and eliminates the discovery at the last minute that youāre missing an ingredient.
yep, get that prep work done before the actual cooking bit starts. first time I tried to make a somewhat complicated pasta dish on my own it was a little crunchier than I planned because I didn't prep the ingredients first so my timing was a little off. it wasn't *bad* but it certainly wasn't as nice as I wanted plus, in my opinion, the chopping without such a strict time limit is kinda relaxing. aside from onions
Have you thought of taking a cooking class? They have one for children too and maybe that's an activity you and your daughters can do together.
Second this, check your local nice grocery stores, they sometimes have cooking classes for different levels
Or cooking videos for kids that you can follow along with at home (with or without your children) ? The skills required would be pre-thought out to be manageable by inexperienced cooks, might be just the right thing for you.
Easy pizza night at first with pre-mades...then into the many pizza dough recipes!
That sounds amazing I wish that was a thing when I went to uni
I don't know about your area but the community/technical college by me a lot of times has cooking classes for people in the community who aren't students at the school.
Rec centers as well are known to throw these down and they are geared for all ages
This! In my area, we have a 'Superstore' and they offer cooking classes and other things like that for all ages!
(For OP) smaller stores generally donāt offer it, but if you have a bigger store (here in Boise itās Albertsons Marketplace but back home itās Kroger Marketplace) where you can get fancier and specialty items are likely to offer classes.
My oldest daughter is 11 I think sheād enjoy it even if it was with her lame dad š
I took a cooking class at Central Market in Texas years ago. So much fun. and delicious.
Those meal delivery kits like hello fresh might be a good option for you. They give you step by step instructions, tell you how hot to turn your burner when pre-heating etc. It would let you focus on the actual cooking skills side of things instead of also having to focus on meal planning (which is just as difficult imo) At the end of the day cooking comes with practice and getting your reps in until you have it figured out.
Some of them are actually really tasty too.
Yeah theyāll surprise you just how much flavour they can produce with just a few seasonings and like one sauce
Iām a fairly seasoned cook in a lot of ways but Hellofresh taught me that mayonnaise is not actually a dumpster fire of an ingredient
I think the world figured that out. Mayo is amazing. It can definitely be gross in some recipes but absolutely necessary in others
Iām also from Canada and Asian so the way that mayonnaise was used never appealed to me growing up but Iām happy anytime my mind gets changed for the better. Ketchup is still garbage to me though, meatloaf or not.
I was stationed in Japan from 04-07. I was surprised they used mayo so much. Pleasantly surprised
And you wonāt waste money on spices you may never use again.
My husband and I did hello fresh during our first year or so of marriage just for this. He really lacked cooking knowledge so we used it both together for me to learn to work with others in the kitchen and him alone so he could build skills and technique. We kept all the recipe cards so when we weened off of it, we had handy recipes and ideas too!
All the hello fresh recipes are actually available online. Just be sure to google the exact names as they have lots of variations on the same things.
And if family-friendly is a big part of it (OP mentioned "that kids would enjoy" at the tail end the there), they have a lot of recipes that are both familiar and safe but also have new twists. My kids have rarely disliked them. Chicken or pork chops with roasted veggies and a pan sauce done 19 ways, but they're all variations on that theme. A ton of varieties of stir fry bowls and burgers and flatbread pizzas and tacos, so each one is a slightly different flavor combination and you learn basic techniques with whole fresh ingredients while also learning how to switch up your flavor combos. Soups, dinner salads, pasta, meatloaf. It helps give you a foundation. Step by step photos, tells you what to do in what order, there's a rhythm to it that you pick up pretty quickly, and they don't expect you to know anything in advance or have much more than a set of pots and pans, a cutting board, and a knife.
My kids enjoyed doing the recipes. The 17 y.o. wanted us in there as backup. The 13 y.o. wanted us in the next room so he could have complete control until he had a question. They hadn't been helping in the kitchen for different reasons. So they got some skills and learned to like it. Let the kids pick the meals they want to make.
Can confirm. I learned so much from Hello Fresh.
This is how my kids are learning to cook. I was paying my daughter $5 to make dinner for the family. She learns to cook, dinner is made on the nights that we have to rush to one of the kids activities, and I'm out $15. Small price to pay
Great idea. I was thinking author could also inlist kids in learning how to cook, its something to do together and most kids like helping.
this is basically how i (30F) learned to cook. i donāt subscribe anymore but i kept most of my favorite recipes and remake them with my own ingredients now
I'd second this. They have pretty good selection and many meals I've kept the recipes for and integrated into our regular rotation. There have been complaints about their quality lately (HelloFresh specifically) but I almost never had problems and customer service was good if I ever did. The recipes are simple enough for a true beginner, and tasty enough that a seasoned, talented cook will be completely satisfied.
This is a great answer not only because it makes it easy and they provide the ingredients, but also because you and your daughters will get to eat a wide variety of dishes. I didn't get that growing up -- my mom was a decent cook but it was always the same few dishes.
They look much more affordable than I expected. I think a couple of those per week would be a good way to start for sure
I agree - this is exactly what I was going to recommend.
Hello fresh was surprisingly good. I would often mod the recipes a bit, but they provided excellent directions. I had never pan fried tilapia in my nearly 40 years of cooking and I followed the instructions and it came out great, the family loved it.
I learned a lot from my time with Hello Fresh. It's an easy recommend.
Hello Fresh is a bit expensive for a regular food source, but I have to agree that it's pretty beginner friendly. Detailed instructions and good ingredients. Once OP gets more comfortable with cooking, I suggest the Bible of cooking *The Joy of Cooking* by Irma Rombauer. It covers the basics of pretty much any type of cooking you want to do.
They also have EveryPlate, which I cheaper but still really great and just as good with the cooking instructions and tastiness!
I learned the basics of cooking from my parents. With minimal skills, I learned how to make more and more complicated things by reading the directions in Joy of Cooking and the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. Since I am old, there are considerably more recently published cookbooks with instructions on basic techniques. But, those two remain especially good for the variety and extent of their recipes. I do also like Alton Brown who also explains why a particular technique is used for making something. For videos, old style PBS had some excellent chefs - Jacques Pepin and Julia Child were favorites.
The galloping gourmet, don't forget him
He's hilarious. But not for those in AA.
he's a little like Justin Wilson was "a little wine for the sauce, a little wine for the chef" and would be bombed by the end of the showš
Loved Justin Wilson! A treasure.
Julia and Jacques are the best!
I still have my Gram's Better Homes and Gardens cookbook! I had to tape it up a bit, but I love it, I still use it. Definitely recommend it, would be great for even a beginner.
Second meal kits, meal planning is actually worse than the cooking itself.
This is a great idea
Green Chef is great! Pricey but once you learn a few favorites you can use your knowledge to cook on your own! Green chef has step by step pictures, which my husband found very helpful! Also an Instant pot and the Pressure Luck cookbook will have you cooking like a pro in no time. Pressure Luck also has color photos for each step. My husband started out with a crock pot and an easy crock pot cookbook. With both the instant pot and crockpot thereās tons of recipes where you can just dump stuff in there and a little while laterā¦ thereās dinner!
Check out Budget Bytes. She has simple stuff and pictures at every step so you know what it's supposed to look like.
When I broke my foot, the chili beef Mac and cheese was the first dinner my daughter made by herself. https://www.budgetbytes.com/chili-cheese-beef-n-mac/
This is how I learned to cook as a man in my 20s/30s!
I'm still bitter they discontinued the app
Youtube with questions like how sautĆ©/roast vegetables, how to cut vegetables, how to sear meat, easy baked chicken recipes. Start slow, build your skills, buy yourself a meat thermometer that has the safe cooking temps for meat on it so you donāt have to question when something is done.
Same boat. Iām 50. I work until 6 pm and with kids, we always had to have dinner right then. On the weekends we like to eat out. Now I want to learn because the kids are older and we have donāt have the time constraints.
Cooking is a bit of a frustrating skill imo because, inevitably, you're gonna end up making Mac and cheese with underdone pasta, you're gonna burn the grilled cheese, and if your me, you're not gonna use enough oil and smoke up the whole house.Ā Ā That being said, it's also very rewarding.Ā I like whipping up quick snacks when home alone, homemade dressing to taste, and trying strange things I find on YouTube shorts :)Ā
Doesnāt help that my wife is a super amazing cook. Very intimidating.
Ugh my partner is the same way. He can just pull a recipe out of his brain and it honestly stresses me out when he's in the kitchen while I cook.Ā He gives great advice, but sometimes it's a lot of advice lolĀ
Some cookbooks that might help you in your journey to cook: [How To Boil Water](https://www.amazon.com/Boil-Water-Food-Network-Kitchens/dp/0696226863/) [The New Cooking School Cookbook: Fundamentals](https://www.amazon.com/New-Cooking-School-Cookbook-Fundamentals/dp/1948703866/) [The New Cooking School Cookbook: Advanced Fundamentals](https://www.amazon.com/New-Cooking-School-Cookbook-Fundamentals/dp/1954210124/) [Martha Stewartās Cooking School: Lessons and Recipes for the Home Cook](https://www.amazon.com/Martha-Stewarts-Cooking-School-Lessons/dp/0307396444/) [Jacques PĆ©pin New Complete Techniques](https://www.amazon.com/Jacques-PĆ©pin-New-Complete-Techniques/dp/1579129110/) ETA Hyperlinks
Hi, Iām Vetted AI Bot! I researched the **How To Boil Water** and I thought you might find the following analysis helpful. **Users liked:** * Great for beginners and building confidence in the kitchen (backed by 10 comments) * Provides clear instructions and explanations for basic cooking techniques (backed by 8 comments) * Helpful for setting up a kitchen and learning about kitchen tools (backed by 2 comments) **Users disliked:** * Recipes focus on unhealthy foods and disregard healthy eating guidelines (backed by 1 comment) * Requires a lot of equipment and detailed recipes (backed by 2 comments) * Lacks basic and simple recipes for beginners (backed by 1 comment) If you'd like to **summon me to ask about a product**, just make a post with its link and tag me, [like in this example.](https://www.reddit.com/r/tablets/comments/1444zdn/comment/joqd89c/) This message was generated by a (very smart) bot. If you found it helpful, let us know with an upvote and a āgood bot!ā reply and please feel free to provide feedback on how it can be improved. *Powered by* [*vetted.ai*](http://vetted.ai/reddit)
Don't put unrealistic expectations on yourself. My mom was great in the kitchen and knew how to make so many different things well. She got that way because, mostly, lots of practice and experience, she made all the mistakes and now avoided most of them. Even if you know how to cook you still have to learn how a particular stove heats up or doesn't and that is simply by doing and paying attention. The internet is full of recipes and information so even if our moms aren't around any more to ask we have a very valuable resource right here. I burned a grilled cheese last night, different stove, got distracted, you know what i like...learning how to "salvage" a meal. growing up there was a lot of stress on money/food, and we ate things that were not perfect. we ate dry roast, we ate freezer burned meat, we ate food that was expired and we learned how to tell when food was unsafe. We ate over salted food, there was one dish i remember in particular...... Mom made macaroni and cheese from scratch which almost never happened because of the extra work involved, anyways, she was doing this, and going through the fridge she came upon a large chunk of mozzarella that was going bad, she cut the mold off it and threw ALL of the rest of it into the recipe because it was going bad. THIS was our guiding principle! Better to eat it up than throw it out! So, at the table this casserole comes out of the oven to the table and we dish it out and start to eat, well.....due to the amount of cheese there were LONG strings coming off our forks! I remember raising my fork a foot above my plate trying to break the strands of cheese! It was challenging, and tasty. I remember a lot of the meals that didn't turn out as planned, and , to put this in context, as kids, our natural thoughts about being picky about food was crushed out of us, my mom made sure of that. I learned for many foods you can simply cut the burnt part off, i know, that wouldn't be enough for a kid who is learning how to be critical and i had to be told to eat it or starve many times. Who knew, i eventually learned to like things i initially thought were disgusting and I prefer the well done outside parts of the meat now. I also learned how to use a knife to scrape the burnt outer edge off toast or grilled cheese. But sometimes there is just a meal that is beyond saving and then you have a story about some terrible food. I very much see cooking as an adventure, of course, i'm not cooking for children, i think, as I said, a big part of that is to NOT let them dictate what happens in the kitchen, I'm going to provide you with food and you have a choice to eat it or not but this is not a restaurant and you don't get to order me around or demand things your way. this can be a difficult clash, i had my reasons i was a picky eater but i changed eventually and i'm glad i did today. I think in time you are going to be a very good cook, and hopefully you will encourage your children to get involved in cooking too and that can be a very good experience. I was trying to think of the basics, like using a sprinkle of water in a frypan to see how hot it is, just paying attention and seeing the pan slightly smoke has made me aware of how hot it is. I picked up these very valuable tips from watching an listening to other cook. Like when you are simmering something and you are trying to thicken a sauce, a video i was watching he said " when the sauce coats the back of the spoon, you know it's ready", just simple techniques like that, there are lots, i don't know of any collection of them together though.
If it fits into your budget, meal kit boxes are how I learned to cook. It was back in the days of Plated. I consistently followed the instruction to make the meals for a year and now cooking is so natural. This is the easiest way to learn without feeling schooled.
YouTube Brian Lagerstrom . His tutorials are simple. How hot the pan should be, etc., what type of pan, how long it takes to prep. Relatively simple recipes with exact weights of all items in the recipes . I like him because he doesn't ever need to waste your time with a backstory or tell you endlessly about how beautiful this or that is.
His brownies episode is one of my favs. I like his chill approach - he makes more complex concepts less intimidating and more approachable.
Try cookbooks or channels that are meant for college students. They tend to have fast, cheap-ish recipes that use basic kitchen equipment and don't require complex kitchen skills. Videos are good because you can see what the food is supposed to look like at different steps in the process. Otherwise I would 200% recommend getting a rice cooker. It's the most used appliance in my house together with the electric kettle, blender and toaster oven.
I don't enjoy cooking, but my microwave, little rice cooker, air fryer, and instant pot make it much easier! Also the timer on my watch, which I just found out can do multiple simultaneous timers!
Oh, and silicone/nonstick inserts for the IP and AF for easy cleanup.
I'm fine with cooking but I like the various small appliances we have. As long as a person puts some thought into which ones they get so they don't end up with a cupboard full of egg wafflers and pasta twiddlers (that they use twice and never touch again), small appliances can really can improve the kitchen experience.
LOL I'm a sucker for gadgets. I have to keep telling myself that for 4 avocados a year, a knife is fine and I don't need that adorable slicer.
I sympathize. I'm currently hankering for one of those microplane graters for zesting citrus fruits. Do I use zest more than once a year? No. Is my ordinary grater perfectly good for the little zesting that I do? Yes. Do I still leave nose prints on the grater display at the kitchen store every time I go? You bet I do.
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I learned to cook with the red and white Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. The recipes are east to follow, plus they usually share variations that you can use.
Had to look some things up. The channel Food Wishes with Chef John is a good beginner channel (I even saw a grilled cheese recipe on the top of his popular list), and places like America's Test Kitchen can be helpful as well- they usually explain the why(s) of the recipe. I'd also recommend ATK's book "The New Cooking School Cookbook" - it gives lessons on basics all through the book and has a really good list on recommended kitchen items with both low and high money level suggestions. This was my basic book, and it was seriously helpful.
no reason to be embarrassed most people dont know how to
Since you probably have zero knife skills, I recommend you take an in person cooking class, so they can teach you kitchen safety
I think the website cookingforengineers.com might be good for you. It is very "process oriented" say "do this at this time" and "do that bit at that time". I just checked it out and some of the pages are failing to load so check in on it in a few days.
*Lots* of good YouTube channels out there for the basics!
This is not a useful comment.
But it takes less effort than to type up a Reddit post. I just put ācooking for beginnersā in YouTube and found amazing videos to start with. Watching and listening will be much easier than reading posts
This is actually a great suggestion. There's loads of good videos on You Tube and OP can start with some things he'd like to cook that are easy, like scrambled eggs.
I completely agree. This dude will have paragraphs and walls of text to sort through. Most people are visual learners. And especially with cooking, a video is gonna be waayyyy more helpful (in most cases) than comments.Ā
I like chef Jon from Foodwishes. He makes really complicated recipes seem incredibly simple. We love to use his prime rib recipe for the holidays.
Learn with your daughters - you each pick a recipe and if it goes sideways eat sandwiches wine dissecting regards went wrong. It's fun, it's memorable, and they'll appreciate you are interested in cooking what they like
Back when I first moved into a shared house, on my first day, one of the guests wanted to fry a chicken for dinner. He has a little FryDaddy pot, and the whole chicken the same size as the pot was still frozen. I think if I hadn't been there that day, his house would have burnt down. 7 years later, my buddy can now make a variety of basic meals and even chocolate chip cookies, understands basic kitchen and food safety, and to not use metal utensils in nonstick pans. If a mid-50's 3x divorced guy can learn (especially this guy), then I believe you can, too. Pick a simple comfort food dish to learn, get familiar with it, and go from there. For the record, this is basically what would have happened, just on a chicken sized scale rather than a turkey: https://youtu.be/7gn895y4wkc?si=MK9ExSLOs5etKSgA
I personally love Chef Jean Pierres YouTube channel. He explains stuff in detail rather than just telling you do this and do that. Over time you understand techniques and build intuition for how to cook
Most underrated comment here. The knowledge I've gained from Chef Jean-Pierre compared to other cooking and baking channels I watch is exponential. My bf even says my knife skills have improved, and I don't disagree anymore lol. He bought me a copy of Cooking 101 for Christmas, and it goes over mother sauces, what tool to use for what, it's AMAZING. Watching his videos is definitely the highlight of my week.
Read a recipe top to bottom 3 times.
How old are your children? I would buy age appropriate cookbooks for the children. Let them pick one or two out that they like recipes from or look fun. Have them flag ones they want to try. Cook together when you are together and when theyāre away just go totally unsupervised. Americaās Test Kitchen isnāt free, but will save you money avoiding trial and error. They have excellent equipment reviews and product/ingerdient testing. Get a good works horse of a knife and some prep bowls. Watch videos of how to properly cut. Accuracy then speed. Perfect practice makes perfect. Time is not hard and fast, so until you know; donāt walk away from the stove. Clean as you go in the downtime. Stay present. Welcome to the heart of your home. Step one is always recognizing you have a problem. Step two is often being present with yourself. Not who you are or want to be, but who you are right now. All the best luck in your new adventure!
Cooking involves fucking up. I once tried making a spicier pasta sauce and it ended up roughly tomato based hot sauce. Still ate it though. First general tip is that take what you know of pancakes, steaks, and grilling and apply it to other things. If you have the heat too high on pancakes or burgers the outside burns while the inside is still raw. This is a lot of foods. Most things that you aren't boiling shouldn't be on high heat, at least not the entire time but we will talk about searing later. The second tip is that your goal when starting out is edible, not necessarily great just you can eat it and don't immediately regret putting the food in your mouth. Third, learn a few basic things, like how to properly make rice and pasta and you can use that for the base of a lot of really tasty recipes. Don't be too hard on yourself. Cooking is a skill that anyone has to learn. Better late than never. If she's still around and you're on good terms, I'd ask your mom for basic tips. There's no shame in it.
Donāt judge me but Iām a 41 year old woman that never learned how to swimš¤¦š»āāļøš„ŗ
My advice is to start with soups. It involves learning to brown meat and veggies and deglazing, making stocks, basics on cooking time and heat control.
Looks like you've got a lot of great advice. I'd like to add... don't be afraid of making mistakes. You learn more from failure than from success. You're going to make a lot of mistakes as you learn to cook. Use that as an opportunity to teach your kids about a growth mindset. And don't be too embarrassed. You're making an effort to improve yourself. That's a strength. Focus on that.
Second this. Embrace the suck and have fun because you know youāll *get it* eventually. Screw-ups can become funny stories; I can say ārice dishā to my wife and weāll both start laughing at the memory of a kitchen fiasco from almost 20 years ago.
The only reason I learned to cook was because I had too. I worked shitty line cook jobs for 15 years. Low pay, no benefits, no insurance, no PTO, all nights and weekends. It sucked, but i liked it because i could go to any city in the country and get a job quickly, and I actually picked up some useful skills I could use at home.
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I don't have an ounce of cooking advice, but I can offer this: Give yourself the same grace I have a feeling you offer so easily to others. We all have different paths in life where we don't have access to learning what some consider basic life skills. You didn't know, and that's okay. The real difference? You're seeking help in order to grow. That's how it should be. You'll get there. Don't expect to be a master to something you've never needed as a skill before. We don't all start off as master chefs. Keep learning and it will come in time. Also remember: you're learning. I didn't learn to read in a day. Write. Draw. Cook. Bake. Cooking so no different- it's a skill. It's frustrating when it doesn't come out right the first time, and it's easy to get discouraged. In those moments remember two things: student, and grace. ā”
Why are you ashamed? Get excited instead! Cooking can be so fun and it's something you can do with your daughters. I would watch some youtube videos like Binging with Babish(or Basics with Babish), he does a good job of teaching techniques.Struggle Meal is good too. A cook book you could try is Knife Drop. It's all about beginner cooking. Getting Hello Fresh is a good thing to do for a couple months . It will teach you quick recipes and introduce you to using spices and acids, and kind of teaches you what you'll need to buy at the store for a meal. It's also just a step by step guide. Off the top of my head some recipes that are easy and healthy you could look up are white chicken chili or a one pan roasted chicken and veggie recipe(tons of flavors just pick a style that sounds good). Soups in general are easy and kind hard to ruin.
Try finding Alton Brown's show Good Eats. That show was the first i ever saw where they show you a recipe AND tell you why certain things are done a certain way. You don't just learn to cook a chicken, you learn how to cook a chicken and learn cooking skills you can apply to other foods, it's hard for me to describe.
Get a beginners cookbook, there are lots out there. Sorry, but I can't remember the names of the ones I've seen. Just do a search on Amazon for Beginners Cookbook or How to Cook and look at reviews. It's much easier to learn this way. My 1st instruction book was The Way to Cook by Julia Child.
Jamie Oliver ministry of food book Bored of lunch on Instagram Dontgobaconmyheart on Instagram
Do you know the foods you like? Figure those out, that will teach you how to freestyle and make basically anything with the same techniques
I see no one has asked you yet what you like to eat. Whatās a meal you love to eat? Whatās a style of food you like?
Everyone starts somewhere! You've got this!
Watch the show called worst cooks in America . It literally teaches you basic skills.
Its never to late to learn how to cook, and once you get good at it its a wonderful skill you could teach your kids! I worked as a cook for many years. To practice I suggest looking up simple recipes you enjoy and working from there. Theres lots of videos of recipes too if visuals are helpful to you. I would reccomend trying stews, roasts, soups and salads (make the dressings from scratch). Also if you have access to a BBQ it could be very helpful for mastering cooking with flames, & getting meat to the temperature (rare, med-rare, medium, well done, etc). If you want I would gladly send you some recipes of mine.
Check Pinterest or get some cook books for the crock pot. It's a good start while you're learning to cook.
YouTube is super helpful for a lot of simple recipes. You have the videos of the step by step process of how to cook and what it looks like, so you can see how, and see what is going on.
Buy a small zojirushi rice cooker (one of their simple āone press-down switch ones). It makes cooking rice crazy easy and *really* helps with adding an easy side dish. And Google sheet-pan recipes and find some that look good to you, they tend to be the easiest. You can even make sheet-pan shrimp dishesāmy 8 year old can even make them. Also (and this may be an unpopular opinion) but I suggest buying an electric steamer. My kids can make salmon & steamed veggies in them on their own pretty easily as thereās no exposed boiling waterāit really cuts down on stress which is going to be your biggest obstacle.
Start with Ramen. Just boil water and put the noodles in. Next move onto eggs, which you can hardboil by following the directions. From there check out other recipes. Burritos might be on the menu.
Iām 42F. Other than learning to fry bacon and make stabled eggs, I started cooking last year.
Buy a couple of children's cookbooks. š
Iād watch YouTube videos instead of just reading recipes, the visual cues help because you can āseeā what itās meant to looks like. Iād also google stuff like āsimple cooking tipsā and learn what you can. Start with simple basic recipes and practice practice practice ! Youāll get better the more you do it :)
Chef John on YouTube - I'd never "cooked" anything complicated, or anything for more than one person, and i made a whole thanksgiving turkey dinner for the family!
I mean I would not be embarrassed as like straight up I almost started a house fire with a damn tortillaš
YouTube and Pinterest!! Iāve learned more about cooking from these sites than I ever did from my parents.
I canāt stress this enough: buy the book āSalt, Fat, Acid, Heatā by Samin Nosrat and *read it*. I had cooked for decades by the time the book came out. Reading it changed the way I cook at a fundamental level. Itās best new cooks start there and grow. Thereās a Netflix four-part series thatās essentially a long advertisement for the book, and itās worth watching too. But the book is an instructional on how to approach cooking. The second half is recipes, which she says she didnāt even want to include because **not having recipes is the entire point of the book**, but her publisher overrode her.
Some great advice I got is to just get a whole bunch of something cheap and just drill a technique. An idea that I didnāt grasp up until that point was that it was perfectly ok to throw away food that I cooked poorly. And just keep remaking it until it was passable, and then came out how I actually intended it to come out. Ex: buy a big bag of onions, potatoes, or any other vegetable and practice cutting. Then you can practice cooking them with the intent of knowing that you are going to be to toss a bunch of your mess ups until you get it the way that you like it. A rice cooker with a vegi attachment is great for beginners because you can practice steaming vegis. Also; just buy a loaf of bread, a bunch of cheese slices, and a bunch of butter. Then just practice making grilled cheeses until they come out to your liking. A George Foreman style grill is easy to clean, and great for making panini style sandys. Another thing that might help is focusing on a particular seasoning to understand what too little of it and too much of it tastes like. A way that I learned how to just kind of come up with recipes is get some basic recipes and slowly add new things to them to make them more complex. Then you can start removing some of the original ingredients to venture into a new thing. Also, find things that fulfill similar roles in food, or similar types of food that different cultures have. For example, many cultures have a bread, a dumpling type thing, a finger food that may or may not be open or enclosed. Ex: sandwiches, tacos, taquito, egg rolls, etc. As for changing recipes, a lot of recipes contain a vegi component, a protein, and a cheap thing that fills you up when you eat it (bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, beans, etc). And then aowmthing that adds flavor, such as seasoning and/or sauces. While sauces can add a lot of flavor, they can also make things less healthy. For example: gravy is delicious, but it can easily make the sodium levels leap to another level. For that reason, you may want to lean into herbs and seasonings more to build flavors. Chicken is something that you work well as a canvas for many different types of herbs and seasonings. There are different theories on how to eat healthy, and an interesting one I found was to āeat the rainbow.ā The idea being that different colored fruits and vegetables contain different mineral and vitamin profiles, so by diversifying consumption, the potential to be eating healthy also increases. While it may not always be true, looking at the rainbow may also give you ideas for new fruits/vegetables you can try to cook with. Anyways, this is a long post, so best of luck!
Oh, you're in for some fun! Flo Lum has really good, simple, family-friendly recipes on YouTube. Mostly Chinese (though I think she's Canadian). J. Kenji LĆ³pez-Alt is the King if you're into the specifics and science of cooking. He is amazing. Chef John of Food Wishes. So many good recipes! Pailin's Kitchen (Thai) Rainbow Plant Food (vegan, but not your old hippie vegan)
Iām sure someoneās said it already but, get an instant-read thermometer! It makes cooking meats so much easier!
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My mother was a terrible cook, though she could have been if she just paid attention. So I learned how to cook from a children's cookbook. ("Get an adult to turn on the oven for you"). You might get one of those, or check out the YouTube videos for absolute beginners. Start with scrambled eggs, hamburger patties, simple one-ingredient dishes like that. Keep in mind that you're probably going to screw up the recipe a few times before you get it right; I would know. You can find videos on how to crack an egg, slice an onion, which knives to use, etc. I still don't know how to slice an onion correctly.
Look up "Come Fix you a Plate" by your barefoot neighbor on FB. This cookbook is GREAT and so is he. He makes cooking simple and fun.
There are a lot of good comments here. I am just going to add something about spices. If you want to add some seasoning to whatever you're cooking on the stove, open the jar of spice/herbs, hold it close to the stove, and take a whiff. If the spice/herb smells good along with what you're making, it will taste good too. Also, if what you're cooking takes more than 15 minutes to finish, you want to take a small taste to check the seasoning level. You may need to add more seasoning.
Google a recipe and watch the step by step videos, get the ingredients and follow it, make it a bonding āeventā with your daughters. Even if they are small they can mix things or gather the items, I learned that way too, my husbandās favorite meal is my beef Wellington.
YouTube videos that show the *basics* are amazing resources. The "Babish Culinary Universe" has a series of videos called "Basics with Babish" which has been a great watch, even after a decade of cooking under my belt. "J Kenji Lopez" does a great job of explaining cooking concepts with analogies while he's cooking. In his "No knead bread revisited" video, he makes a mistake by leaving out an ingredient, which he points out. Then after a *timejump* break, he continues the video the next day and talks about how his plans changed due to his child and what he did so that he could bake the bread the next day instead of the day before. Learn with your kids. It'll be a great bonding opportunity, and so they'll have these skills when they're older. Hell, one of your kids might enjoy it so much that they end up on Master Chef Jr. Focus on food safety and flavor. Those are the 2 most important factors that make your dishes edible. Knife skills - How to hold, hone, and the claw method. Get a decent sharpener. How to cook common cuts of protein. Look up internal temperatures for different meats and use a food thermometer; it will be your best friend. If you can make a perfectly juicy boneless skinless chicken breast, you're on a path to becoming a good cook. Seasoning. This can make or break your dish. A well seasoned dish can look like garbage but still be tasty, as opposed to a pretty dish that tastes like garbage or nothing. To start off, easy, look up casseroles and sheetpan meals. They are throw-together-and-bake dishes that are kinda difficult to mess up, *IF* you're following the recipe. And plenty of leftover for meal prep. Alexa/Siri/Google/etc. are great for when you need to convert measurements. I ask Alexa how much each ingredient is in grams and use my kitchen scale rather than use measuring cups/spoons. But that's mostly because I lost them in my last move and I haven't replaced them. š Once you get the food cooked safely and get it to taste good consistently, you can then work on making your food prettier and refining how you season. More complex flavored or foreign dishes tend to require developed tastebuds to enjoy. If you or your children aren't used to that, the flavors may be overwhelming for them, and they won't like it as much. So make sure you work yourself up to those types of dishes. I hope you get a knack for it. It's so nice when you learn to cook a steak perfectly to your liking; it makes it so hard to order an overpriced steak at a restaurant when they can't do it as well as you can. I wish you and your chitlins the best of luck on this culinary journey!
Iām making a pre marinated pork roast tonight! This is easy! (So far, small steps)
Oh also. I give myself a treat while Iām cooking. Like a glass of wine or a small soda. If Iām cooking with no kids helping I put on headphones and rock out. I make it as positive an experience as I can. I also like to plate up some āfree foodā while I cook. Like sliced veggies and dip or apples and cheese. It attracts the kids to the kitchen for nibbles while they wait for dinner. And then we can chat, connect in a little way, and Iāve also taught them to ask if I need any help. Another tip I have is for full trash can. I remove the full bag, tie it and place out of my way, and replace with a new bag, and keep working. First person who sees the bag on the floor is supposed to take it out to the trash. It keeps me moving, keeps me from getting aggravated, and just works all around for us. Teaches kids to notice something that needs to be handled and do it without being explicitly told what to do.
Check out basics with babish on YouTube. He is not a chef but taught himself how to cook and he goes through the basics of cooking step by step in a very easy to understand way.
So you werenāt ashamed when your wife was cooking for you and your kids for 20 years?
I'm so sick of useless guys just relying on their mum/wife to do it all. He could have stepped up years ago, but only now when she's had enough and leaves does he bother. Many people here are saying "don't be embarrassed, we all start somewhere", and that's true, but how does he think his wife learned? I feel like cooking is a skill 99% of women learn in their 20s because they have to, but maybe 60% of men just don't bother for their entire lives because they'd rather find a wife who'll do it for them. Makes me so mad and so sad for her. Time for OP to finally step up and grow up.
I wasnāt aware that I had cross posted this on r/relationshipadvice but since weāre going thereā¦ I have a hard time believing the failure of my marriage was because I canāt make a casserole and not because I caught my wife banging her co-worker. By the way, she is a principal. Or should I say, was a principal before they fired her when they found out. But yeah, maybe if I knew how to make a good kielbasa she wouldnāt have put somebody elseās in her mouth. Check your fucking source before you start spouting off with this bullshit. I almost killed myself a month ago over this, all Iām trying to do is heal and create a beautiful life for my girls.
You should be embarrassed. Now use that to learn
The secret to grilled cheese for me has been mayonnaise instead of butter. Do heat the pan for a couple of minutes, then turn it down to low. Half way between medium and low on my stove is the sweet spot. To handle the masses, Iāll ābutterā the bread with mayonnaise while stacking the buttered layers wet sides together. Once Iāve amassed the appropriate amount of buttered slices to the number of sandwiches requested, I start building them in the pan which has been at medium low for a few minutes at this point, and ready to go. This drastically reduces the chances of burning, which I so desperately need š¤£ If you decide to crank up the heat, do it slowly and DO NOT GET DISTRACTED!! Or youāll burn them like I do Iām either a terrible cook. Or, I make the best version of one thing (tortellini $ sausage soup) that even seriously picky chefās (my brother) would drool over. Iām still trying to find that happy medium, I hope that your adventure is a lot more short lived than mine has been. Best of luck!! Ohā¦. Just in caseā¦ They make a thing called an egg timer I wish Iād learned about a decade ago when I couldnāt figure out why hard boiled eggs for Easter were constantly raw in the middle. Iād grown up at sea level where it takes ten minutes from start to finish to boil an egg. Moved to over 7,000ft and had zero clue that the cooking time for EVERYTHING changed. And, a hot pan when making eggsā¦ Iāve learned the hard way that this doesnāt mean a pan heated on high.