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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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.