Learning to Cook
Learning to Cook
A howdy hello to everyone,
Getting older has made me realize the deficits in my cooking skills. I was a very picky eater growing up, and started to widen my palate so that I wouldn’t be condemned to eating some form of bread with cheese for my entire life. I love fruits and vegetables, so there’s no problem here. Grains are a bit difficult because of their texture.
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.
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.
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. When I made aloo gobi, my cauliflower was too large, the potatoes were undercooked, and the other veggies were just a pile of slop. Sometimes other dishes will not be entirely cooked and other parts will be burnt.
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. I have been working out and live a much more active lifestyle compared to how sedentary I was in university. Walking around 10 hours a day has made me truly realize the feeling of hunger. An emotion I normally never felt due to stomach problems and perpetual nausea.
I am very good at cooking breakfast foods, but do not want to eat French toast or Pancakes every single day. I’d like to add a broader spectrum to my breakfasts as well, as it is a quite small subset. I tried learning the cookiebookie latex package to write a cookbook as I went, but I gave up on trying to get it working. Formatting documents is an entirely different post.
This is turning into a rant, but for those of you whose special interests are cooking and who have found a spectrum of foods that are nutritious and filling, what advice would you have for me? What cookware do you recommend? Is there a set of recipes you think would be good to introduce cooking techniques? My end goal would be to cook with mostly anything I have on hand to turn it into something delicious and nutritious. Protein rich meals, vitamins, minerals, calories, etc.
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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.
This is the funny cookbook. The author made it free to download. https://traumbooks.itch.io/the-sad-bastard-cookbook
This is actually a great write up for beginner cooks. Well written!
I'd like to emphasise a thing that I found not as clear as the rest: When planning when to start cooking things, I find that starting from the end and planning backwards is helpful.
I want it done by 18:30. Plating takes 2 minutes, food needs done 18:28 latest. Meat takes 8 minutes, so should start 18:20 latest, veg takes 6 minutes but can be done at the same time - 18:24. Etc.
This is hard when you start out, but after having fried meat and boiled veggies a few times you'll get an idea both of how long it takes, how much you can manage at a time, and how much time is lost in the other things (getting plates, getting burnt, forgetting stuff, etc).
If you're the type of ND that doesn't work backwards, you either use your strategies, or perhaps group tasks in roughly equal blocks. Maybe chopping onions & garlic, browning them and then frying the meat in the same pan takes 20 minutes, which might be the same as boiling potatoes.
On the topic of kitchen cheating/checking.
You can taste things to adjust seasoning, use a spoon (like a teaspoon), dip it, blow/wait for it to cool, and taste it. Start with salt and main flavor, and as you get more experienced you can add more nuanced stuff ("this needs some orange zest" is a ways down the road).
Also: for any meats, eggs, fish, and flour dishes (and some others) you can use an oven thermometer for perfect results.
Look up and print out a temperature chart and you can have your dishes perfectly cooked every time, no dryness, gummyness or undercooking.