Cooking

I find jotting down my own simplified version* of the recipe in my little food stained a4 book helps.

i.e. written in a fluent style of idiotese I can easily understand. And then you can add any modifications you make as you become more confident and comfortable with the recipe.

It's a process. Start with one dish you really like to eat a lot. Even if no cooking is involved. Like how to make a nice salad with dressing from scratch. Or hummus. We don't eat a lot/any meat so I am sure someone else will have better tips for learning how to cook meat. This past year I pretty much added in 4 indian dishes, naan and two different pasta shapes from scratch to my repertoire just from cross referencing a couple of videos.

I was super bored one cold cold winter and had run out of things to watch so I ended up watching 8 seasons of top chef in one month. It was ridiculous. But it totally changed how I cook.

I also am super boring so I will make a spinach salad the night before work and take that in religiously. Basically because I hate salads so if it's already at work, I am super lazy and will end up eating it instead of spending $10 on lunch out.

If you get into making soups no veg should go to waste, and it is the easiest cooking you'll ever learn.

friend of mine took a cooking class last year - was once a week for a month or two, and he seemed to enjoy it and learn quite a bit.

another thing i like to do is go to the library and poke around. i spent like 2 hours going through a gigantic book on Yucatan yesterday and jotted down some simple recipes. even a recipe for a simple pot of beans included a step that i think is more interesting than how i've made them in the past. sry if this is useless for your purposes though

some basic dried spices I keep around:

cumin
"Italian Seasoning" or "Herb de Provence" (needs to have thyme and rosemary at a minimum)
salt
pepper
chili powder
chinese 5-spice
bay leaves

Soup is really easy and keeps for days even if you don't freeze it (which you can).

You will need a stock pot, a ladle and a wooden spoon. Have a sharp knife for cutting veg. Also, measuring spoons and a cup measure.

some liquid ingredients to have around

vinegar
unsalted soup stock
and chili garlic sauce

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this is all good advice. building a pantry is really important.

i learned to cook by starting with cooking light and martha stewart 5-ingredient recipe books, building up my pantry, and practicing a lot. from there i was able to figure out what i was really interested in making and was off and running in most respects.

one thing that's nice to have around based on what you're describing is a basic homemade stir-fry sauce: https://www.recipetineats.com/real-chinese-purpose-stir-fry-sauce/

I watched Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat on Netflix not long ago and it seemed to have a good mix of explaining why things work together and showing how to gather and prepare them. I remember thinking "no shit" a lot when she was explaining some things then realizing that a lot of them were things I had to trial and error my way to over 20 years of cooking.

Learning a dish you like and being able to make it the same (or close) every time from memory is really rewarding, and if you do this enough you'll have a good library of things to choose from. Then you can start to mix and match preparations and ingredients and seasonings and freestyle knowing which things work together, what order to do things in so they'll all be ready at the same time, etc.

I always keep olive oil, peanut oil, sesame oil, soy sauce, fish sauce, rice and sherry vinegar, hot pepper sauce/flakes/powder, cumin, coriander, sugar, salt, and pepper around in my pantry and all will last for ages. I regularly buy ginger, green onions, onions, garlic, lemons, limes, thyme, and cilantro and with all those can probably cook about 85% of the things I make regularly.

Be creative. When I make salads for myself I basically only dress it with grey poupon. It's quick, no calories and gives me that creamy acid that I like. I think I always have 4 mustards, 4 hot sauces, lemons and 3 types of vinegar around. I end up putting balsamic in a lot of things. and since I am half asian we always have those types of foodstuffs around. I think I get anxiety if I don't have eggs in the house because if I am lazy in the evening I will just make a quick omelette or black beans with a fried egg on top.

yeah and salt, fat, acid ^^^ was very good.

i think Treeship is too noob for salt fat acid heat though. it’s good for an amateur chef but not pure beginner

imo this is the learn to cook algorithm
1. look up recipe
2. buy ingredients
3. make it
4. repeat
eventually you drop step 1. it’ll be expensive at first because you won’t have expensive storable like olive oil, but it’ll quickly get cheaper over time. bay leaves and bouillon cubes aren’t as pricy but v important storables that make food tasty.

if your groceries are spoiling in your fridge you either need to cook more frequently or refrigerate. buy some tupperware. also don’t buy too many salad vegetables at once, if it’s easy to pick up fresh produce on your way home. also if you can tell something isn’t gonna make it rub some olive oil salt and pepper on it and roast it in your oven

buy a rice cooker and crock pot/slow cooker at a charity shop. almost impossible to fuck up with these two, and you can make large quantities of stews or chillis in the slow cooker.

rice cookers are great for when you make a curry/chilli type dish and can't arsed with any extra complications to think about.

I was thinking Top Chef and salt fat heat are good just to get excited about cooking and not think of it as a chore (which it is totally a chore most of the time).

As weird as Alton Brown has gotten in his middle age, his Good Eats is a very good resource for the kitchen beginner, if your library has the DVDs. His approach lines up with mine -- don't focus on recipes, focus on ingredients and techniques. Learn why the building blocks of the meal react as they do -- to salt, fat, acid, heat, etc.

Furikake is a great pantry staple -- a relatively cheap hit of flavor on any plain grain.

I'm pro- bay leaf but the trick is to put a lot more than the number called for.

flopson's algorithm otm. and give yourself enough time to get your mise en place so the cooking part is stress free. read the recipes well in advance and think about what's going on. in my experience, you will have some early failures because you won't know what things like "medium-high heat" mean for your stove and cookware until you get some more experience. buy some cheap wood spoons. many recipes use Diamond Crystal kosher salt, which is half as salty as other table salt. so you have to taste the food. find ways to use up older ingredients. some can be revitalized in an ice water bath. or you can use them to make veg stock that you freeze. cooking is awesome, and learning how will be worth it!

I endorse flopson's algorithm. Here's my cooking tips which are more about technique/approach than what food to cook.

If you're cooking for yourself, plan to waste food. Live with wasting food. Don't, like, try to waste food, but there's only so many days in a row you can eat the same thing and only so many things you can cook where you get strictly one serving out of it.

Cook for others when possible as soon as you're comfortable with it even a little bit. It's incredibly motivating, and people enjoy being fed.

Touch the food with your hands. If you ever feel like what you're doing with a spoon is too fiddly, just use your hands.

Acclimate to heat. Move confidently around your stovetop. You'll burn yourself a little bit on a handle or something every now and then, it'll be ok. Run cold water on it.

You can learn basic knife skills through osmosis by watching cooking shows.

You can never own too many prep bowls.

xps rather than the tv prog, the book of "salt fat acid heat" is great and I absolutely *would* recommend it to a beginner as it explains a lot of stuff really well and with bags of enthusiasm.

and also Treeship. assuming you have eaten in the last 30 years, what do you like to eat? google that + "simple recipe" and give it a go.

One of our go-to recipe sources is Smitten Kitchen, she has been blogging recipes for ages and probably has two general American cookbooks' worth of recipes by now. And two actual cookbooks.

don't get one of those silly fucker food processors that have too many washable parts, just get a half decent stainless steel stick blender that can be washed in a minute.

Flopson and Silby offer some good advice.

If you like Italian, pasta recipes are often very simple and therefore offer high reward for your effort. They often can involve many shelf stable items (dry pasta, canned good quality tomatoes, etc.), so you only need to purchase a few perishable items. Vegetarian or near-vegetarian pasta recipes are plentiful. Many pasta recipes will reheat well (or well enough to take to work for lunch for a few days). Did I say I like pasta?

Not necessarily for beginners, but my greatest cooking epiphany was when I started making my own stocks. Very simple and not time consuming when you consider you are free to do other things during most of the cooking time. The difference it makes to most dishes is incredible.

^^ otm on stocks. If you go to any of the big box stores that sell the $5 roast chicken, the best part of the bird is the half gallon of fresh stock you get from the carcass.

don't be intimidated. cooking is pretty easy. (cooking elaborate dishes and/or cooking incredibly tasty things on the regular is more difficult.)
don't be afraid to mess up. if you eat meat, get a (digital) meat thermometer to greatly reduce the chances of messing up.
unless you're cooking for a group or you really really want to eat the same thing for 4 meals, halve the recipe.
splurge on one good pan (relatively large) and one good knife (doesn't have to be super expensive even). I use the same pan and knife 90% of the time.

bay leaves are bullshit. don't give in to big bay leaf

I'm trying out a smallish cast iron pan before buying a bigger one if I'm happy with it. My non-stick Ken Hom wok is getting a bit old now.

I've been thinking of geting a carbon steal pan. Has anyone used one?

treeship if your aim is lots of veggies and non-refined grains, I would really recommend starting with making something like quinoa, which I find easier to get right over brown rice, and then mixing in veggies, spices, beans that you like.

https://www.theawl.com/2016/03/the-vast-bay-leaf-conspiracy/

I would really recommend starting with making something like quinoa, which I find easier to get right over brown rice

I use a rice cooker and it's entirely idiot proof -- i.e. I have no idea how you might get brown rice wrong (well, maybe if you don't put enough water in it).

I got rid of my rice cooker when I got an instant pot and now can't use my instant pot because I am afraid of plugging it into a transformer and blowing something out (different voltage where I am ). I also adhere just eyeing the water added to rice, which totally does not work for brown rice. And it takes forever.

Plus, I hate rice unless for sushi or poke.

This is all great advice but I would also like to add that it’s ok to not enjoy cooking - there are tons of nutritious meal delivery services that are affordable depending on your budget

For years and years I forced myself to cook. I hated it. I can do it reasonably well but I just hate it. Probs bc I had to cook most nights for my family of 5 from the ages of 13-18. So a couple years ago I just decided to stop and started using Freshly

(The last few months I’ve been cooking 4 nights a week but it’s for my husband and he eats literally the same meal for like a year before he gets sick of it, which is the polar opposite to me. Currently his dinner is:
Japanese sweet potato (the best kind of sweet potato)
Brussels sprouts
Broccoli
tossed in olive salt and some dried herbs, roasted till the greens caramlize
Diced tempeh, browned in olive oil
Add diced carrots and green beans and kale plus salt and garlic powder, then a little water or stock to steam it all a little after getting a little brown on the veggies)

It’s also ok to buy precooked components and throw them together if that causes less stress around cooking for you (eg trader Joe’s has lots of this kind of stuff - a bag of frozen cooked rice, a bag of frozen steamed veggies and a jar of some sort of sauce, can make a pretty nutritious meal)

yeah like as much as lex was relentlessly clowned for his stance on cooking it's pretty reasonable to be lex

(controp)

I love cooking but I hate cleaning up

I also adhere just eyeing the water added to rice, which totally does not work for brown rice. And it takes forever.

Yeah, brown rice is definitely slower, but I have yet to screw it up with the variable amounts of water that I've used in the past. Maybe we have different definitions of rice well done (I love rice so)?

I read a brown rice technique a few days ago that I haven't tried yet but am looking forward to trying: boil the rice in loads of water as though it were pasta (40 minutes), turn off heat, drain rice in colander for 10 seconds, put back in the pot and let it steam itself done (10 minutes).

Brown rice is not this hard, unless I'm making terrible rice without realizing it.

Use 2-1 water to rice ratio, rise and drain several times first if desired although ime there's not a lot of dust on brown rice bc the bran layer is protective.

Bring to hard boil and boil until the rising bubbles leave visible holes in the rice layer. This means around to when the water level is about at the same height as the rice surface. Turn ALL THE WAY DOWN as low as poss and cover, leaving the rice to basically steam.

I don't have times for this, I just kinda eyeball it, sorry.

My brown rice cooking method:

1. Add 3 scoops rice (dry)
2. Add water up to the 3.5 mark in the inner pot (as opposed to 3 for white rice).
3. Press the thing (as Abe Lincoln once said).

There are a lot of good suggestions here, thank you. I went to Paradise Burger tonight (my god, so good) but tomorrow I got a grocery list from my mom i will try out. I am going to sub in quinoa for brown rice though—only change to what my mom sent me!

I’m excited for having an adult grocery approach though. I might actually have more money in the end if this works out. I imagine it will be healthier, too, than what i eat now.

Ilx is actually really helpful when I need advice and I appreciate it, even though I spend a lot of my time complaining about this place behind everyone’s back. (Mostly kidding on the last point)

lots of good advice here and I wld echo those saying that soups and salads are a good place to start. I was going to say they're hard to fuck up but then I remembered the first time I made soup it was so thick I stored the leftovers on a plate.

generally I enjoy cooking a lot but I have been through periods of hating it and I think cooking can be a really stressful and miserable experience. with this in mind my advice is:

- have a nice kitchen. this is both largely out of your control and also one of the biggest factors in how enjoyable it is ime. playing some sumptuous music, having a beer, cooking with friends or whatever else you can do to make the ambience agreeable can make a huge difference though.

- cook when you're not hungry (or at least not starving). lack of time pressure is also good. the other day I was stressed abt cooking for some guests and I went to the chippy first and it was a magnificent decision.

- cook little things/not whole meals. it both lowers the stakes and is a good way of experimenting, practising, and building up skills. just try and fry some mushrooms really well. try chopping up carrots in ways which are pleasing and will make them cook differently. when I started cooking I was very focused on cost and scale and tended to cook huge quantities of whatever I made, but it's harder to control and more disheartening if it goes wrong. you don't have to eat a big plateful of one thing at once. being able to eat what you want is the best thing abt cooking, so doing things that free you up and don't feel prescriptive is, for me at least, v useful

- youtube. mb I'm just a visual learner but watching how something changes in a pan and so on is much more useful to me than reading abt theory or getting precise measurements. there is an insane amt of content on there and you can see what looks appealing/feasible quite easily.

I’m glad videos are good for somebody b/c the idea of trying to learn a recipe from a video makes me crazy.

it's easy to overwhelm yourself too and get too many things because you think you're gonna cook all this shit. that's when you waste food. try one thing that you know you will want to eat, make a few portions so you can have leftovers, if you like it enough do it the next week. make another thing the following week, after a while you will have built up a memory of how things work. you can do it if you do one thing at a time. pasta with chickpeas and vegetables or whatever.

a good way to build a pantry of spices is to get a few spice jars or mason jars and visit your local indian store to get the couple things you need, they have most of them for extremely cheap. but the quantities will be large. i cook a lot of indian food and i'm still working on jars of whole spices i got a few years ago. each larger bag was way cheaper than the small quantities you get at the grocery store.

a spicy bean soup would be good too, treesh

otm. indian markets are the absolute best for cheap spices in quantity.

this is more a nesting thing than a cooking thing but i store spices in square plastic containers like these:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01HBZZD80/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

due to the fact that square things can stack and store better than round things and big wide containers are much easier to measure out of than stupid little jars.

good posts itt

id only add a few personal learnings that nobidy told me:

1. let a pan/pot heat up good and hot first works musch better for most things. dont be intimidated by the noise/sticking of the initial contact, you'll learn hiw to handle it

2. cooking staples like rice/potatoes/porridge ive always found tough to get right, these days i add the relevant liquid, whack it up fairly high, leave it without poking until the time called for in whatever recipe. results are much better now tho i get the odd pot of mush.

3. allow more time than it said or that you thought

Oh yeah number 1 there is key. Fat goes in hot pans, food goes in hot fat.

This is actually the most important thing: if you skip adding in the ~tablespoon of oil or butter you can substitute that with drinking a beer or glass of wine instead. It's about the same caloric intake.

yeah my old one used to sometimes fail to seal properly and boil off the water because i was covering the valve up a tiny bit so it couldn't pop up. new one is designed better.

I've just discovered cooked.wiki/ and hoo boy...

It takes out all the rambling and noise of a recipe webpage. Completely life changing.

My Step Mom used to make a appetizer called (salupbow). They were pork filled steamed DUMPLINGS!. Do you know of which I speak

― Sharon Welles, Friday, April 23, 2004 12:12 PM (nineteen years ago)

I believe OP was referring to 小笼包, the mighty xiaolongbao and yes Sharon, I am embarrassingly familiar with that which you speak.

omg brownie thank you - incredible!

My partner can't eat alliums (garlic, onion, shallots etc) which is challenging. Recently realized that ginger and lemongrass makes a great alternate flavor base.

nice! have you ever seen the chef's table episode with Jeong Kwan? she doesn't use alliums, so there might be some more ideas there for you.

Holy shit at cooked.wiki!

I haven't seen that episode, but will check it out. Thanks!

talking of garlic - the callouses on my left hand mincing veg fingers have cracked again and feel very sore in contact with wet minced garlic. A minor quibble, but I need to learn how to stop my skin cracking.

BROWNIE YOU LEGEND ILU

^^^

Bon Appetit!

Oh sheesh, my current (terrible) method of saving recipes involves editing the text of the bookmark to mention "add more salt", "too much flour", etc. I'll have to give cooked.wiki a go, looks way better

I got the Paprika recipe when it was on sale for like $2 and it’s amazing - you put the recipe url into the app’s browser and it pulls the ingredients and directions into two separate tabs (and cuts out everything else). It’s been great because I’ve been telling myself for years I’ll write down all these recipes and I never do.