Cooking

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.

Alternately be teetotal and constantly bake and eat cookies

I loved cooking for years and sort of thought about getting into it professionally at one point (which I’m kind of glad I didn’t) but grad school and having a kid turned it into an unpleasant burden most of the time. I’ve been easing back into it but totally understand people who get no pleasure at all from it.

I need some resources—i googled but every recipe calls for bay leaves and bouillon cubes and other things that i don’t really know what they are.

If you are that much of a blank slate then you need to start off with the very basics and work your way up.

The good news is that even if you can't cook, you've been eating food for a long time. Presumably this means you can distinguish between foods you like and those you dislike, and between a food item that is well prepared and one that is unappealing. So you have a sort of platonic idea of what you are aiming for and have a sound basis to judge how close you came to the desired results.

The bad news is that you appear to have spent almost no time in kitchens either cooking or else observing cooks cooking, and seem to be very ignorant of the first principles of cooking. That will take time and effort to remedy, mainly because you have to learn how your ingredients behave in different combinations, when exposed to different kinds of heat, when cut in different sizes, and placed in different combinations. You learn that by doing, by close observation, and by eating your failures.

Start with salads. Then simple steamed vegetables. Then simple grains and legumes. Then soups. Buy a basic cookbook aimed at inexperienced cooks. There are a ton of these, many of them decades old. Read the introductory materials, not just the recipes. If you fail, think about what went wrong and try again. As you cook, ALWAYS PAY ATTENTION! That's how you see what your ingredients are doing.

Good luck. All it takes is determination, application and a dash of optimism, until it all turns into valuable experience and, eventually, skill. You're smart. I know you can do it, if you put in the work.

nb I was joking about not knowing what that stuff was. But I get scared off of recipes that call for too many ingredients.

id probably say start with stews and bologneses and chillis and suchlike

cant really go wrong if you start careful with amounts of salt/seasoning, nothing needs to be done quickly or too well, lots of room for you to experiment, and the ingredients needed and batches produced will set you up with the basics while also giving you a quick win ito racking up economic results

I suggest Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, which is less than ideal as a general cookbook in some respects but it’s the one that got me going.

I get scared off of recipes that call for too many ingredients.

That's your innate wisdom asserting itself. If they are scary, then wait until they seem more in line with your skill set.

btw, you can cook very, very well while never making any dish with an ingredient list in double digits.

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.

― Yerac, Friday, 4 January 2019 01:55 (forty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is crucial yes

sipping away with a playlist on while a long prep comes together is actually the greatest thing imo

fwiw i don't really consider "number of ingredients" to be telling most of the time, like are they a) shelf-stable spices and pantry items, b) inexpensive vegetables and grains, c) imported cheese, cured meats, wine, and a dozen eggs for pasta dough? it makes a difference, and yes i am outing myself.

My favorite recipes are the ones where the only ingredient is cured meat

reasonable take

I actually should get started learning this stuff bc my current apartment has kind of a great kitchen

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.