How do I learn to plan meals and cook?
How do I learn to plan meals and cook?
Recent change in life circumstances, and now I'm trying to figure out how to be an adult about food. I want to focus on eating healthy. I have very little foundational knowledge, so I need ELI5-level content. I'd love some online resources that I could use to learn. In-person classes are not a great fit. Anyone have any recommendations?
Ooohboy. Foundational knowledge is tricky, because cooking is very much applied knowledge. Book or even observational learning is fairly meh, you have to do it.
Honestly, the best advice I can give is to start with breakfast. Scramble some eggs to eat with toast. Try your hands at pancakes. French toast. Stuff like that.
Just get recipes online, look for well-reviewed ones and they'll at least be okay. Usually. You can watch videos to get an overview, but you're going to find when you go to do it yourself, it's more "uuuuhhh...." since videos always have so much cutting in them and the video can't communicate things like heat. Make sure you google any recipe vocab you don't know. Don't guess, google it.
Reason for breakfast is that the recipes are brain-dead easy, relatively forgiving of any fuckups, and will begin to teach you the basics in a certain order. You'll get heat management and recipe reading, and even work in some knife skills with things like omelettes. Start with scrambled eggs though. Very basic lesson in heat management and cooking time, hard to fuck up, will build some confidence.