I grew up with parents that did a lot of the support stuff around the house without making me learn any of it. The result was me going away to college not knowing how to cook, clean, do laundry, fix things, or really any of the practical day-to-day life skills one needs to live independently.

Luckily, I lived with the maybe unsupported belief that I could do anything if I tried, and failing seemed really low stakes, so I managed to figure things out.

I am completely dogshit at cooking. Whenever I try a new recipe, I either burn or undercook the food, resulting in about an hour wasted of poor planning.

There are a few tricks you can do to guard yourself here.

First, if you’re using the stovetop, turn the heat down. A lot. Especially if you have an electric coil stove. Most recipes are seemingly written to gas stovetops, and at high settings, electric stoves end up transferring way more heat into the cookware than a gas flame on high (flames lick up around the edge, and like half of the heat is lost to the environment). If you’re using electric stoves, you basically never want to turn them up above 60% unless you’re boiling water. So, treat 6/10 as “high” and adjust your scale accordingly.

Second, use a timer. Don’t let yourself walk away from the stove for more than a few minutes at a time, and if food is looking close to done, don’t walk away at all. Things go from “mostly cooked” to “done” in a matter of seconds.

Third, pre-heat your cookware. Don’t add food to a cold pan. Add a small amount of fat while it is cold, and use its appearance to judge whether it’s hot enough to add food or not. If you’re using butter, wait for it to bubble; oil, wait for it to take on a shimmery appearance. Adding food to cold or unlubricated cookware can cause it to stick, and stick bad. More importantly, it’s easy to walk away from a cold pan, and it doesn’t remain cold for nearly as long as you think.

Let’s take eggs as an example. Frying an egg is trickier than it seems, particularly if you like a loose yolk, because yolks cook at lower temperatures than whites. Adding a knob of butter – about a teaspoon, or roughly 1" X 1" x 0.25" – to a non-stick pan, turning the heat to medium-high, and then watching for the bubbles tells you when to add the egg. The egg should sizzle a little, and the thinnest parts of the albumen should turn white immediately. Add a small pinch of salt, pepper, or other spices you may like at this time, then watch the egg carefully.

Gradually, the white should turn more and more opaque. It should take a minute or two.

If you want a fully runny yolk, flip it when it’s opaque about half-way up; if you want it less runny or more gelled, wait until it’s almost fully opaque, but still glossy. Once you’ve turned it over, it only needs to cook for about 60 seconds. The timing here will involve some trial and error to hit the exact yolk consistency that you want. Remember that it’s OK if it’s not perfect.

Fourth, and finally, for baking, get an in-oven probe thermometer and an oven thermometer. Always pre-heat the oven, and don’t trust the temperature setting until you’ve verified it with the stand-along oven thermometer. Baking and roasting is all about temperature control. It’s ok to cook at a lower temperature than the recipe calls for, it will just take longer for it to finish cooking. It’s also ok to cook roasted foods to lower temperatures than guidelines, so long as you cook them for longer. This will usually prevent things like meats from drying out as much. For instance, safety guidelines say to cook poultry to 165 deg. F, but this is the temperature that instantly kills microbes. It will also dry out the meat somewhat significantly. If you can get and keep the temperature at or above 150 F for four to five minutes, it will be just as safe. And it takes time for heat to penetrate the meat, so the internals usually continue to increase by 5 to 10 F after you remove it from the oven, so you’ll almost always be able to keep it hot enough for long enough if you remove it at 150.

But, of course, monitor it yourself to be sure. Or turn the oven off and crack open the door for a couple of minutes before actually removing it if you’re worried it’s not going to hold.

This may involve walking back and forth around the kitchen getting ingredients as needed, forgetting to do a step, or forgetting an ingredient that is sitting on the counter away from me.

Honestly, prepare everything you can in advance. Make a checklist, and break things down into steps. Chop of everything you need to fry. Put dense items like carrots and potatoes in the same bowl. Put lighter items like onions and celery together. Keep delicates like garlic separate. Pre-mix dry ingredients. Keep reactives like baking powder or baking soda to the side until you know you need them. This all takes a little extra time, but while you’re learning it’s really helpful to front-load a lot of the work and to keep track of it as you go.

Also, read the full recipe and instructions in advance. A lot of cookbooks and cooking videos are poorly written and produced, and will throw “quiet” steps in like they expect you to know they’re coming, like “mystery” shows that don’t give you enough information to solve the mystery before the protagonist.

My motor skills are sometimes clumsy with cutting, so oftentimes the vegetables and fruit are cut too thick, or not to the point where the recipe expects them.

This comes with practice, and a home cook does not need the level of consistency or exactness that a chef in a Michelin star restaurant does, and if it’s something that’s really finicky that does, maybe skip it until you’re more practiced.

Or buy a mandolin.

That’s not usually necessary, though. Most cooking does not require strict tolerances on the size of things. The consequence of slicing things thicker than you meant to is that it will take slightly longer to cook.

Like, every recipe under the sun will tell you to chop or slice vegetables into equally thick units, but that functionally never happens in a home kitchen. It’s not that important.

When I made aloo gobi, my cauliflower was too large, the potatoes were undercooked, and the other veggies were just a pile of slop.

This is ok. Treat this as a learning experience. Slice your florets in half one more time, and add your vegetables to the dish at different times, starting with the potatoes, and ending with the stuff that turned out as mush. It’s easier to cook things for different amounts of time than it is to figure out the exact sizes you need to make things so they take equally long to cook. Especially since some ingredients will stand up to being cooked for longer while others won’t.

Also, you can use a microwave to finish a dish that has some components that didn’t get quite enough time on the stove or in the oven.

Oftentimes I might hate the taste of what I’ve made, so ultimately I will act to not eat anything because I don’t want to waste money cooking then going out

This is really hard, and I know is an incredibly frustrating experience. It takes time and experience with flavours and flavouring ingredients to get a sense for what works, and what fixes things when they don’t work.

Try to keep in mind when cooking that you can always add more of a flavour, but it’s really, really hard to remove it if you add too much. Start conservative with seasoning, and build it up as you cook the dish.

Make sure you use enough salt. If things are bland, even if you’ve added spices and other seasonings, it’s probably because there’s not enough salt. But add it lightly, testing the flavour over time. It’s really hard to unsalt a dish if you go overboard.

I know it can feel really daunting to try and cook. Failure, as you say, can mean feeling like you don’t get to eat. But failure is also a teacher, and you’ve expressed specifics here that point you toward the kinds of things you can do next time to make things better.

Something that can help with all of this is a cooking journal. It’s a place where you can write down your prep notes, as well as the outcome of the dish, what was wrong, what could be done better. Try and keep things small to start, and work with forgiving ingredients (dark poultry meat, for instance, if you eat meat, or waxy potatoes). You build up your skills, and your intuition, slowly over time.

You can do it. You just have to make it OK to fail. There’s no shame in not being good at something you’ve never learned to do.

In addition to the other suggestions I would recommend finding Alton Brown’s show Good Eats. He explains why and how things work in an entertaining way, sort of like Bill Nye for food science.

I grew up watching him, in addition to the practical experience I had with family and restaurant work, and I still find his teaching and recipes invaluable.

If you can afford it, try one of the meal kit services. I did that for teaching my kids how to cook, but also got a lot out of it. They deliver a package of ingredients, already planned and proportioned, and easy to follow steps. It really helped me step up to more elaborate meals.

Another approach is to find some part of cooking you can get enthusiastic about. If you are excited to do something, you’ll spend more time getting it right. Maybe it’s a different cuisine, or appliance, or tools. For example, I got enthusiastic about cast iron cookware: less forever plastic, buy it for life, can be cheap, but you need new habits for heat control and for cleaning. While learning those, I upped my skillet game

As someone who also learned a bit later and was mostly self taught, here’s my advice

First, all you really need to have a complete meal is protein, carbs and veggies. So pick a few healthily ones of each, something like: Carb: rice, pasta, quinoa Protein: fish, turkey, chicken Veggie: broccoli, spinach, peppers

(Obviously pick whatever you prefer)

But the idea is, get very comfortable just making those 9 things, and then mix and match/add spices to give variety. But aiming for those types of 3 piece meals will keep things manageable and nutritionally complete.

Then as you said, the next thing is fully cooking but not overcooking. And that, like anything, is just practice. Only piece of advice I’ll give is, whenever you move on to prepping another piece of food while something else is cooking on the stove, set it to low while you’ll do it. Prep will always take a bit longer than expected, and the food will burn.

Then last is, getting it all to come out at the same time. That also a bit of practice since you have to factor in prep, but again, for these 3 piece meals all cooked separately, it’s pretty easy to manage and estimate.

Then once you have these basic in your pocket, you can experiment, be creative, and try different things. But it will give you a solid base nutritionally and build you confidence as a cook.

I can relate to being a picky eater and not liking the taste of things. I go through hundreds of cookbooks and it’s difficult to find recipes I like. Forgetting an ingredient is normal. I’ll often forget baking soda at the end of the recipe and the result will be flat. You may want to double check the recipe after you’ve done anything to make sure everything’s there. I’ve also been having trouble lately making sure all the ingredients I took out are put away in the refrigerator and often find something that went bad when it was accidentally left out. What I like about cooking is that most flops are still edible and at their worst, if you don’t like it, someone else might.

You mentioned you like fruits and vegetables. You may want to go to the local farmer’s market or vegetable stand and see if there are some more unusual fruits and vegetables to try. I’ve been experimenting with making squash as a side dish. If you can get the squash open, it’s fairly easy to make. Asparagus is another quick option. I’ve been using a microwave steamer. It’s great for reheating vegetables or certain leftovers. If you want to avoid the plastic varieties, I just found a silicone based one by Cuisinart. Also, if you’re making pancakes, waffles might be another option to try. Crepes are another possibility and you can also use them as egg roll wrappers or in lasagna or manicotti dishes to replace store bought versions. Pasta is fairly easy to cook. I’ve been boiling lentil or lentil/rice pastas a lot lately. A nori roll with rice and/or vegetable filling is another easy option. I’ve also been experimenting with collard greens as a wrapper lately. Another nice cooking tool I’ve found is a rotary slicer. It’s useful for grating foods or making baked french fries. I have a Vitamix, but I’ll frequently just use an inexpensive coffee/nut grinder to grind flax, seeds or grains. The Vitamix is good for making ices from frozen fruits and making seed/nut or fruit butters though. I’ve even used it in place of a stand mixer when I make a crepe batter.

If you want to enrich what you’re making, there are ways to sneak healthy things into a recipe without altering the taste. Most recipes that include sugar have too much and you can lower it gradually without missing it. There are tricks like the Cornell triple rich formula. Substitute part of the flour in the recipe for healthier ingredients like that formula or just add a spoon of healthy ingredients like flax, etc. Add more vegetables to dishes. If you’re having a pizza, add a lot of vegetable toppings. I like to use unbuffered vitamin C powder as an acid that works with baking soda. Heat might destroy a lot of the C, but you’re still getting some that you might not otherwise get. It depends on your goals but you can usually alter recipes you like in small ways to make them more nutritious.

I really like Nicolette Dumke’s books. She uses very basic ingredients and explains how you can substitute ingredients for ones that you’re more comfortable with. You can find some of her recipe books on archive.org or possibly at your local library.

I use HTML for my formatting and wkhtmltopdf to create documents instead of latex. Some people prefer markup for document formatting. Plain text has a lot of benefits and is very portable. It’s useful for notes, todo lists and there’s no reason one can’t store recipes that way.

I read tons of recipes books and I feel lucky if I find even one I like. However, I do find something useful that actually tastes good once in a while. So, I feel like it’s worth the effort to keep searching for new ideas. Good luck in your own search. If you come across any useful recipes along the way, I hope you’ll share them.

One of the things I’ve found that’s helped me is America’s Test Kitchen. Seriously. They test everything thoroughly, explain why things work and what’s commonly done wrong, and give good clear instructions for doing things.

I’m a stimulation seeker when it comes to food, but I also have the need to understand why recipes work or fail. I made ATK’s jambalaya recipe with my partner and it was easy because of their directions (use a food processor to chop veg, here is how you know when the meat is ready, this is why cooking rice doesn’t always work), and super delicious. We bought the cookbook that has all the recipes from the show, and I keep finding new recipes to try that satisfy my need to know.

Also, anyone who says prep your ingredients before starting to actually cook is 100% correct. It’s really made my cooking so much better and less stressful. I love to cook for myself and my partner now that I can prep thoroughly beforehand.

I feel you, I was in basically the same situation when I first learnt cooking. I just wanted some good, nutritious eats without burning my home, hands or wallet.

Cooking can be a way to nutrition, but it can also be a lot of fun experimenting and getting to know your own preferences.

My suggestion would be to a) face that this is going to be a process, there’s both knowledge skill, time and planning to be sunk into this before you get good, b) get a basic level cookbook, c) simplify.

First of all, you won’t gain several years of cooking experience without putting in the work. We’re working baby steps, but we can do them in a way that’s fun for adults.

You can almost certainly learn one recipe and one variant per week. This is usually much more fun as you get to pick and plan for the thing, and have a second go at something you’d like to.

Recipe books come in different qualities, and with different readers in mind. Have a browse through second-hand books, stores, online reviews and find a sensible home style cooking book. Make sure you can follow the recipes and that align with what you’d like to learn. We had a whole no-nonsense home cooking movement in the 70s here with recipes that are pragmatic, easy to adapt and hilariously different to current recipe culture (50 word recipe, vs 4000 words about the author’s mother).

The reason to pick a book is to keep to one author and not switch between different cooking styles or writing styles, and have a way to check off progress. Also you’ll learn what adaptations you prefer: more garlic? Less grains? More cowbell? Etc.

A good way to start is with something you know you like, a promising recipe and a few tries (maybe spaced over a week or so). You mentioned pancakes and French toast, maybe try a Spanish omelette, or a German (oven) pancake? Maybe eventually a fried rice?

As for variants, it’s not harder than trying it either with slightly different ingredients (mushrooms instead of bell peppers) or in a different way/recipe (maybe the recipe was stupid). This also helps you learn what are the important parts, and what can be changed, in any recipe.

Last tip is to simplify. You’re in this for the long haul. Maybe start with cooking 2 meals a week, or one per day, or whatever is only a little challenging to you. Don’t do all different recipes, start with one, and branch to a few with time. You’ll learn both how and when to vary your menu as you go along, meanwhile it’s easier to progress (as well as cheaper and more nutritious) to keep to fewer but good recipes in a rotation.

For me, I keep to about 5 dishes per week, with two prepped big batch recipes for most of it, and a “novel” dish/day from a pool of recipes. Easy to shop for, easy to vary, and very little day-to-day planning.

As for cookware it depends on style of cooking. I’m European and we enjoy cooking from raw ingredients, so I mostly use two knives (one sharp good quality chefs knife, and a smaller knife), a good cutting board (wood!), a skillet (IKEA carbon steel is lovely), a spatula, pots (2 and 5 l, with lids), a whisk/hand mixer, an oven safe tray, some measures, a spoon for tasting.

There’s some other nice to haves: like fruit peelers, oven mitts, kitchen towels, a tranche skillet (deep skillet), a colander, garlic press, etc.

But you’ll figure that out as you find what ingredients come often.

As you continue learning one recipe at a time, some of them will stick with you, bookmark those, and most will be one-and-done. Between them and the variants, you should be able to both learn a bunch of useful recipes to put into rotation, as well as how to vary them according to season/pantry, but most importantly what you enjoy in your food. Nothing tastes quite like home cooked, because it tastes just how you like it.

Good luck on your culinary journey!

Love cooking but not trained in any way shape or form.

For ease and confidence building, I absolutely love a slow cooker. Some dishes are “roughly chop and add these ingredients, stir, and then walk away for 8 hours” and are pretty forgiving on the timing as well.

If you’re comfy with pancakes and french toast, could try more pan-fried foods - omelettes are fairly forgiving and if they end up not being whole, you’ve got scrambled eggs 😅. Could also consider some oven tray bakes like https://www.hairybikers.com/recipes/view/spanish-style-chicken-bake - these need a little more precision on cutting (mainly potatoes to be honest) but not much, and again are walk away and leave to cook.

Hope that helps!

Hi,

Good of you to ask advice when recognising you experience problems. I’m not a professional cook, but I can cook well enough for it to be okay for other people. The problem in this case being that I learned by doing, trial and error and over a period of 15+ years now. Which means I can’t give steps to follow or the advice that will trigger improvement. Since I don’t know what your knowledge or experience entails, I’ll share the broadest of advice. (Even though NT people would find it too basic and might get offended. This is not my intention and I hope you will ignore every part which you deem redundant )

• Cutting, preparing, gattering ingredients etc. takes time. If something is already cooking/boiling it will not pause and wait for you. Even though it’s hard as you’ve already shared with us, try to read a recipe ahead of cooking, gather as much of the necesseities close by where you can find them, and wash and cut the ingredients before you start heating some other part of the meal. I’m notoriously slow in preparing too cook. I have burned or overcooked many meals by underestimating how long I need to look for or cut other ingredients. This rule of not turning on the stove untill after having prepared most of the things has helped me.
• Not everything has the same preperation time. “To start cooking” isn’t the same thing as “putting everything on the stove around the same time”. If potatoes need 14 minutes to cook, but a thin piece of meat will be ready in 5 minutes, start with boiling the potatoes for 8-9minutes and then start cooking the meat. If both start at the same time the meat will either burn for cooking too long or risk getting cold or chewy for being done too early. It’s better when most things are done relatively at the same time.
• As you said cutting can be hard. Know that the size of things impacts how long they need to cook/boil. Generally a larger chunk needs to be cooked longer to be done. So when cutting, try to have all the parts of your ingredient roughly the same size. Most of the times this means don’t have one part which is twice or more the size of another part. If it is cut it again. If things are not twice as big it often counts as close enough for the means of cooking.
• It’s okay and possible to check if something is done while cooking! For boiling potatoes or vegetables you can prick them with a fork. Just like on your plate, you want to feel it’s not too hard. If it is too hard, cook for longer. If it’s not, this ingredient is done. Some things like meats you can cut open to see if it’s still raw on the inside.

To summarize, a.k.a. TL;DR:

• don’t start cooking one ingredient untill you have prepared (gathered/washed/cut) ALL ingredients
• don’t put everything on the stove at the same time (if it has different preparation times)
• test while cooking

I hope you can find a bit of use in some of this advice.

My go too recipe is cooking (not boiling) garlic, onion, bell pepper and another vegatable in a pan (wok?). Depending on spices or sauce I serve it with rice, noodles/ramen or pasta. “Another vegetable” can change per day too switch things up and not eat the same thing everyday. I love zucchini (though dislike the English word for it), celery and/or carrots as the extra vegetable. But anything can work!

Also, I’ve found a funny cookbook which may help. It’s full of dark humour. Not to be taken too seriously, but it has helped me with the confidence too cook what I need. The premise of the book is “you need to eat something, otherwise you die” and it acknowledges that cooking can be a hassle and can cost a lot of energy. I’ll look up the pdf and edit this or add an extra comment.

Someone said a slow cooker - I can also add a pressure cooker. Just add the ingredients, seal it, walk away, 30m-1h later your soup/stew/porridge or even rice is ready. No need to overthink it.

Cooking needs some practice and a bit of patience. I only learned to cook in my late 20s. In time I learned how long a particular ingredient needs to sit in the oven and at which temperature (it’s almost always 30m at 180-200°C), and which spice goes with which meat. I use a lot of canned veggies and readymade spice mixes - curry, chili con carne, they are so much easier this way. Also, make sure there is enough salt, the lack of salt can really make any food bland. Oh, and butter. You can never go wrong with butter. Fry your eggs in butter (lower temp, it burns quickly), add it to your boiled rice with a pinch of salt, it’s really versatile and adds a butt load of flavor.

For me I just keep it simple, we got a air fryer/toaster oven and I get some protein like salmon, beef, chicken, or pork. Then I get some green vegetable like asparagus or brocoli and something like a potato or sweet potato.

Then I stick a thermometer in the protein and oil and salt pepper the potato’s and put some seasoning on the meat and toss it in the oven

Or a salad but that’s a whole thing

I save the fancier dishes for the weekends and I like to write out the recipe into step by step so it makes sense to me I even measure out any ingredients before I get started.

Hmm, sounds like you’re maybe aiming a bit too high, with how many ingredients are involved. Like, yeah, it’s good to eventually get there, because it’s nutritious and yummy, but they add quite a bit of complexity in preparation and then getting everything cooked to the same degree.

I cook a lot, but if more than a handful of ingredients are involved, I need to prepare all of them and put them into little bowls before I even think about turning on the stove.
And then, yeah, as was already suggested, cooking them separately (microwave or otherwise) and then just combining them at the end, that will also help with not having things overcooked or undercooked.

But yeah, when I say I cook a lot, most of the time it’s noodles with tomato sauce two or three ingredients + varying spices.
Maybe you can find some simple recipes you like to eat+make regularly, then try playing around with those recipes (e.g. swap out an ingredient, try out different spices) and every so often you tackle a bigger recipe.

I guess, maybe you could also pick out a complex recipe you want to make and then try to cook simple meals which involve a subset of the ingredients, so you can get some experience with that ingredient…

Cooking time is very variable, focus more on the look, smell and taste than a precise timing. Taste regularly. Cooking is all about experience so the only way to really get better at it is to try and retry, taking notes may help.

I’m by no means an expert but I’ve learned a bit over the years. Start with easy stuff like basic Italian pasta dishes and maybe learn to make a good, basic tomato sauce or how a pesto works. I feel Italian cuisine is a good start because a) it’s awesome and b) it’s mostly focused on using a few ingredients to maximum effect. So if you make a mistake it’s not that bad. Maybe learn a decent curry, too. All you really need is coconut milk, some kind of fruit like mango/peach/anything sweet really, some chicken (or lentils/chickpeas for meatless curry) and rice. Of course there’s more to it, like the right spices - but you can start with spice mixtures. If you’ve got a thing for pattern recognition and start to branch out you’ll realize very quickly that cooking isn’t really that hard to learn, it’s just hard to master. Oh and I’d recommend you check out overnight oats. A few spoons of oats, a little jam, a few crushed nuts and seeds and top it off with milk/oatmilk/cream/water and put in the fridge over night. Does wonders for your gut.

Hope to have helped