Get yourself a slow cooker. You can make crazy easy and tasty stuff with one. Most recipes just involve chopping up some ingredients and throwing them in the pot to cook for 8hrs.

I cannot express how much a rice cooker and an air fryer make things so much easier.

Smoked paprika is a very nice spice.

If you have cats, they will be on the counters. Wash everything before cooking anything. Even if you don't, probably still should.

Sometimes experiments taste bad. This is okay. We learn yes yes.

My top three resources for cooking:

Alton Brown. I've been a fan of his for over 20 years at this point. He used to make cooking shows for the Food Network, but has been making YouTube videos that are, IMO, his best work yet. He's like the Bill Nye of cooking. Each episode is a deep dive into a topic, with explanations of the science and history behind the steps of the recipe.

J. Kenji López-Alt. He's behind Serious Eats and has a YouTube channel. Serious Eats in particular prefaces their recipes not with filler stories like some sites, but detailed explanations of the decisions they made for the recipe, and often different options you can take. When I want to cook something new, I will usually look for a bunch of recipes from different sources to get a feel for what they have in common and how they differ. If there's an article on Serious Eats, especially by Kenji, I can probably just stop there.

Brian Lagerstrom. These are the most conventional cooking videos on the list, but he's also THE most directly practical cook on this list. By that I mean, there have been more occasions where I've seen him make a recipe, decided to try it out, and actually done it fairly soon after with success. The recipes are very well-explained, and sometimes even shows you why you should do things a certain way by showing you what happens if you don't. Every food presenter will workshop recipes, but it's rare that they show you the failed versions to teach you something!

All of these are great for explaining the process of cooking. It's one thing to just copy a recipe, but understanding the why behind it is so much more useful to teaching you how to cook in general. That helps you build overall skills, and develop the ability to modify recipes, improvise, and maybe even develop your own recipes.

I'll also second Chef John and Babish. When I go looking for a specific recipe, they're names I look out for and know have good information. I also quite like Adam Ragusea, but he is the reason I installed SponsorBlock. (He's gotten much better, but there was a particularly annoying period where he was REALLY chasing ad dollars. Can't really blame him, he has a family and wanted to make a career of the channel, and did.)

Best of luck! Cooking can be fun, and such a good skill to have. :)

The instant pot pressure cooker is extremely underrated. It can replace a rice cooker and can also make things like chicken tacos, baked/mashed potatoes, hard boiled eggs, oatmeal, and can slow cook in a pinch. Plus it cuts cooking time in half.

Soup is the garbage disposal for your fridge. As long as it's not actively rotting, throw it in a pot and boil in for two hours, it will taste pretty good. The more different things you add, the better it tastes.

Any time you eat meat, keep the scraps/fat bits/bones, stick them in a container in your freezer. Toss that in the soup pot.

If you ever start watching YouTube tutorials around cooking, there's a reason Binging With Banish is a huge name.

Between ingredient cost, recipe difficulty, taste and the product actually coming out right, I've always found him super reliable.

But a huge part of cooking doesn't come from recipes, it comes from experimentation. Learning how to make a simple pasta sauce from tinned tomatoes and other things is a useful step, because 90% of the ingredients last a while, so you only need to buy a few cheap bits, and can control the flavour yourself to find out what you like.

It's worth noting that eating at home can still easily become accidentally expensive. Pasta and pasta sauce is a reliable way to keep prices low when cooking, but once you're cooking with 20 ingredients, it can creep up quickly, although most of these can last weeks, if not months, so you only need to buy them once in a while.

You might be tempted to go buy a bunch of equipment but you can get really far with the basics once you've learned good technique:

• a decent paring knife and 10" chef's knife (Victorinox fibrox are decent quality and not too expensive as knives go)
• an end grain wood cutting board
• a medium sauce pan
• one or two sheet pans
• one 8" or 10" stainless steel skillet
• a spatula and some wooden spoons
• a pair of tongs
• stackable measuring cups and spoons

That will get you very far. If you find you're enjoying cooking and want to improve your kit, you can add things as you need them (whisk, masher, boning knife, stock pot, etc.). Try to avoid buying unitaskers. You can mince garlic with a knife, so unless you're mincing a ton of garlic, a garlic press is probably not a good investment because it only does one thing.

There are a ton of video tutorials for learning knife skills online but if you want something printed, Henkels has a Complete Book of Knife Skills that I've found very useful.

You'll want to keep your knives sharp. You can learn to do it yourself with a double sided 400/1000 water stone and a video tutorial. A ceramic pull through sharpener will do in a pinch but they're pretty hard on the knives. Metal pull through sharpeners will destroy the edges of your knives, so don't buy one of those. Also don't use anything motorized because the heat can damage the heat treat and wreck your knife.

You will read on the Internet that cast iron is the One True Material for skillets and frying pans. People who say this are in a cult. Cast iron pans are great for searing because they retain a lot of heat but stainless clad aluminum will give you better control and more even heating, Teflon will give you better non-stick performance, etc. Personally, I reach for my stainless steel skillet most often, which is why I recommended it above. You may also read that you should never wash cast iron with soap because it will ruin the seasoning. This is bunk. The seasoning is chemically bonded to the surface and you can't scrub it away unless you're physically removing material with hard abrasives or caustic chemicals. Soap and a scrubby will not hurt your pan. Do thoroughly dry anything cast iron after you wash it, as it will rust if you don't.

There is probably a restaurant supply in your area and they are probably open to the public. That's a great place to get things like skillets, sheet pans, racks, ramekins, tongs, etc.

Pick up (or borrow from the library) a cookbook that teaches cooking technique through recipes. These are some of my favourites:

• Ruhlmann's Twenty - Michael Ruhlmann
• The Food Lab - J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
• Salt Fat Acid Heat - Samin Nosrat

Stock up on spices. Depending on the cuisine of yoir choice. I find that pepper and salt are a must have. Paprika, Oregano, Thyme, Basil and Nutmeg are my go-to's.

Maybe you could try making the pasta sauce next. It is pretty simple actually: Take your protein (like ground beef) and fry it in a pan, season with salt pepper (and paprika if you are fancy).

While it's doing that, dice some onions. Once the protein is done, take it out of the pan and add the onions. Lower the heat and gently fry them until they turn glassy. Their moisture will also loosen the residue the meat left in the pan, which is full of flavour.

While onions are cooking peel some carrots and shred them. Once the onions are done, add the carrots, and the meat back together.

Add tomate puree from a can, season with i.e: oregano, thyme, rosemary, basil. Paprika is crucial in my opinion as it gives the sauce some extra depth. Fresh parsely is also very nice. I find it elevates a very basic dish to something quite good :3

Fellow non-cook that sometimes dabbles here: my favorite easy food prep is a pack of ramen, then add a whole bunch of stuff I like. I cook this according to the directions on the packet, but while it's boiling I'll add a teaspoon of my favorite hot sauce, some smoked tofu, maybe some kimchi, corn, beans, and/or whatever I'm in the mood for.

Just a broad commentary on both recipes and seasoning. My mother refuses to cook anything without a recipe that she strictly follows, even if it's something she's been making for decades. I'm on the other side of that and will rarely make actual recipes and instead read a few similar ones to draw from similarities and just wing it. I also don't measure any spices because it's all based on taste instead.

Neither approach is inherently good or bad, just enjoy it.

Really amazing stuff! The biggest mental thing for me is stay proud of yourself, so many people never put in the effort so even if you make something that doesn't come out quite right you're still kicking ass. One of my super easy go-to meals is cherry tomato pasta. Cook some cherry tomatoes and minced garlic in a good glug of olive oil until some of the tomatoes begin to burst. Meanwhile, boil some pasta. Throw the pasta in the cherry tomato pan, finish with salt and pepper, basil and Parm if you feel fancy, and viola! In terms of learning about cooking, I cannot recommend J. Kenji Lopez-Alt on YouTube enough. I love his personality, and he really explains why he does what he does when he makes food. It fits my style of learning, and allows me to learn the fundamentals that I can translate to whatever I want to cook. He has a great blend of easy recipes and large projects too if you ever start feeling ambitious in the kitchen.

Don't be afraid to cut corners or make easy "cheat" dishes when you start out. Not everything has to be from scratch or top quality or take you all day to make. I've made recipes as hard as beef wellington and I've made microwave bean nachos and both hit in the right context. There's a lot of pomposity in cooking and it's good in its place, but at the end of the day its just something we do for fun. Don't forget to have fun when you cook!

My favorite Youtuber is Binging with Babish, others will probably mention him; he is getting very popular in recent years. He is a lot of fun, wholesome, down to earth and the man can cook.

My favorite cookbook is The Flavor Matrix by James Briscione; it talks abot food synergy, pairings and a bit of food science. Overall a good intermediate read.

My favorite recipe is Babish's level 10 cookies, which is my favorite dessert of all time.

My favorite dish is Bucatini Carbonara, a Central Italian pasta dish made with eggs, cheese, and pancetta or guanciale. Authentic carbonara is a true delight, but (don't tell the Italians) you can make an easy version with bacon and onions that is pretty dang good.

Honestly most home cooking is not very hard. You do need to be taught a few basic concepts, like how to chop vegetables, what different cooking methods like frying/sautéing/baking/roasting/etc refer to, but once you have the basic concepts down, you can do the majority of recipes you find online.

For learning the basics, there are quite a few cookbooks aimed at complete beginners. I was staying with a friend and rifling through her cookbooks—she had one aimed at students that spent time explaining all the basic cooking concepts at the start of the book before you get to the recipes.

Where the skill comes in is stopping following recipes and being able to come up with a dish that tastes good. It takes a while to learn good flavour combinations, when's the right time to add an ingredient, how exactly to cook each ingredient, etc. But I would say a beginner can follow the majority of recipes I see shared around online. Just look for recipes that sound like something you actually want to eat. Read the instructions to check they don't sound too hard, and then go for it. Good luck, and enjoy your cooking journey!

Better Than Bouillon is.

Yooooo this community slaps, what is going on? Literally every post a useful piece of advice. You rock!

Boneless skinless chicken thighs in the air fryer. Season with salt, pepper, onion and garlic powder, smoked paprika. Preheat to 380°, cook for 10 minutes flat side down, flip and cook for 4-5minutes. Chop it up and you’ve got protein for burritos (or bowls), pasta or rice. Swap out the salt and pepper for Slap Yo Mama for a bit of heat. Swap the smoked paprika for oregano and rosemary for pasta. Or not. It is so universal, and 1 hours work can net you protein for 4 days.

this recipe is one of my favourite things to eat. it's am gonna break it down into phases for you, so it's not so difficult at first.

first time around, just fry 500 grams of ground beef until nice and brown. while it's cooking, make this sauce :

1/4 cup low sodium soy sauce 4 cloves garlic finely minced or grated 1 tablespoon sesame oil 2 tablespoons brown sugar 1 tablespoon rice vinegar 1 tablespoon ginger root grated 1 teaspoon chili garlic sauce (sambal olek)

once the beef has finished cooking, add the sauce to the pan, and cook for a minute or two. serve it over rice.

if you like that recipe, then you can make it fancier and tastier.

this time, you want to first chop up an onion, and cook that until translucent. when you first put the beef in the pan, chop up some baby bok choy, (or something similar), into strips. wash it. then when the beef is almost finished cooking, add the bok choy to the pan. cook until it starts to wilt. (usually my pan is very full from the bok choy, but don't worry... it will decrease in size as it cooks).

once the bok choy has wilted, add the sauce like before, and cook for 1-2 minutes, and serve over rice.

next time you make the recipe :

before you start cooking, get a carrot, and shred it. place it in a bowl, and add 1 Tbsp rice vinegar 1/2 tsp sugar pinch of salt mix that up, and leave to sit while you do the rest of the recipe. congrats - you just made 'quick pickled carrots' which sounds fancy when you tell people.

make the rest of the recipe as before, but this time, also cut up some green onions, so that when you've finished cooking, you add rice to the bowl, put the ground beef on top of that, then add your shredded carrot, and sprinkle some green onions on top. now you have a fancy presentation, and even more flavour!

the ultimate version of this :

do all the cooking and prep mentioned above, but this time also dice up some cucumber. you will also need a few extra garnishes here : sesame seeds, Kewpie mayo, sriracha, crispy fried onions, and crunchy fried garlic.

this time you are going to plate everything in separate piles. rice, beef, cucumber, carrots, and green onions. then you want to drizzle really thin lines of Kewpie back and forth, across the whole dish. then rotate the plate/bowl 90 degrees, and do the same with sriracha, being careful here, if you don't want too much heat. then sprinkle the sesame seeds, fried garlic and fried onions over everything. congrats - you have now made a restuarant-worthy and trendy Korean Beef Bowl!!!

feel free to ask questions, because i think there's a huge chance that i didn't explain this very well. good luck on your culinary journey!

My #1 piece of advice that helped me the most: don't be afraid to try stuff and throw it away if you don't like it.

I know, it's wasteful, but if you force yourself to eat every mistake you'll make yourself too scared to try new things.

For many meals I will mix my spices ahead of time and use that throughout.

For example, tonight I made fried chicken. Last night I mixed up some spices and used that with olive oil and vinegar for the marinade. Today I put most of what was left into the flour for the batter, and the rest I sprinkled on top as soon as I pulled it from the fryer.

You can use "better then bouillon" way more often than you think. I mean, I tossed some into my marinade last night. Would you like more chicken flavor in your chicken? Hell yes! Just throw in a tablespoon.

With few exceptions, most of the time when you are adding water, you could add stock instead and get a much better flavor. Chicken, beef, vegetable, seafood, use the right one for the meal.

It's easy to make, but you can totally buy it from the store. If you buy it, buy the one with the highest protein content.

Last thing, MSG. Use it like any spice. It's magic. It's the essence of flavor. It will make almost anything 2 levels better.

Ayyy, I'm so fuckin proud of you!

Relatively recently I discovered the wonders of prepping my veg and aromatics in advance and freezing them- shit makes throwing together food so fuckin easy, it fills me with joy

Pasta sauce: The jarred stuff is loaded with salt. Get 2 cans of diced tomatoes (I get sodium-free petite diced) and one 6oz can of tomato paste. Dump them in a pan to heat up and add black pepper, basil, oregano, and whatever other spices you want to taste. It’s nearly as easy and tastes way better.

Omelet: I tried finding the minute long video that taught me this a few years back but it’s now lost to the sea of how to omelet videos out there. Crack the egg(s) into a bowl and nothing else. Blend them with a fork or whisk. Heat the pan on the stove to 3, 4 max. Lower is better. Then throw enough butter on to melt across the pan, maybe a tbsp. Cover the surface with the melted butter, then dump the egg blend on top. You should use enough eggs to just barely cover the pan about a half centimeter thick. Let it cook all the way through, it can take a bit on the low heat, but it’s worth it. As it finishes cooking through throw some shredded cheese, spinach, or whatever on top. Fold it over however you like. I really wish I could find that video because it’s a lot easier to see than to read.

America's Test Kitchen. Super great information and taught in a way that doesn't require specialized tools. It's PBS so no sponsorships or anything. Lan Lam is my favorite. They have full episodes on YouTube as well.

https://youtube.com/@americastestkitchen

Also, use this for recipes. It's open source and free. Also you can use their import tool to scrape recipes of ATK workout paying. I do recommend supporting them, but sometimes you don't have the money. The app looks real cool for atk.

RecipeSage:
https://recipesage.com/
You can even "add it to your phone's desktop" and it will behave like an app. :⁠-⁠)

I recommend investing in a nicer rice cooker. The cheaper ones always burn the bottom. Them use some boxed broth or stock instead of water. You can throw in a can of chicken and add cheese at the end and you have easy chicken and rice.

A few suggestions. My first is to keep what you are doing about fancying up store bought items. It's so easy to elevate a store bought sauce with some herbs, spices or a few cooked items like sausage or mushrooms. Go crazy with whatever you think will taste good. Add way more herbs and spices then a recipe suggests to see what it tastes like. From here you can spend more time to find what is "worth it" to cook "from scratch". Unless you are a professional kitchen there's always items you will make and those you buy.

Second if you want to learn the science and technique of cooking (which you might not want to) there's one cookbook you need. Salt, Fat, Acid Heat will talk about what you need in each dish. There's also a netflix series about it if you want a preview. Have fun and eat!!!!!

https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-slow-cooked-bolognese-sauce-recipe

Very beginner friendly meal that punches way above its weight. I've never done it with the chicken livers he calls for and it still turns out great. I usually use 1 pound of turkey, pork, and beef each instead of the lamb.

You basically brown your meat, then brown up your diced vegetables, and toss it in the oven for a few hours. Great with just noodles, but I'll take the leftovers and make lasagna with it.

And other than the dish you put your cooked meat on before adding it back to the pot, you can do it all in one pot saving clean up.

smoked paprika.

I'm a fan of eatingwell for "healthier" recipes.

Looking up "one pot" meals might give you some ideas. I like recipes of that sort to cut down on the cleanup required.

One of the first things I worked on is taking store bought pasta sauce and making it fancier. Cook some diced onion in the pot first then add the sauce, brown some meat, wait I want more garlic, some pepper flakes would make this nice, maybe a bit of red wine vinegar. Just experiment with one thing at a time. Once I started dicing and adding tomato I realized I was basically making it from scratch but using a preseasoned base instead of just tomato sauce so I got rid of the premade part

You can do this with a lot of things to help learn about how one or two ingredients work. Take the store bought thing, make it fancier. Get increasingly fancy until you're confident in the flavors then try from scratch

Taco seasoning, Mac and cheese, spaghetti, chicken soup, chili, all kinds of stuff works well

Cook for your friends. Few things bring people together like food.

Start with one or two close friends. They'll be tickled pink. Repeat every week or so.
Try your food experiments out on them.
Chanced are they'll get into it too.

That feedback can be great motivation and it lets people know to buy you cooking gear for holidays.

I’m a big fan of Alton Brown for both cooking and baking information. He had a television show called Good Eats, but these days he has a YouTube channel. A good video to start with might be one to make sure your knife technique is good, since this makes lots of cooking easier: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yqsW4O8Ejmw

A couple of pieces of advice:

Treat recipes as lists of techniques

When you look at recipes, don't just look at them as 'instructions to make [insert meal here]'. Look at them as ways to prepare and cook [insert ingredient here] as well. Here is an 'easy' recipe for Ragù alla Bolognese (it's a pretty crap Bolognese recipe to be honest, but it works for this example because it's so simple). And, of course, it tells you how to make a very basic Bolognese sauce.

But it also tells you how to make a flavor base for a sauce using onion and garlic. It tells you how to get more flavour from the ground beef by browning it. It tells you how to enrich your sauce with red wine, and that you should let that simmer until the alcohol has mostly evaporated. It gives you some things you can add to a sauce to get more flavor: Worcestershire sauce, bay leaves, and thyme. It tells you that you can get a richer, deeper flavor by simmering for a long time. Each of these techniques is transferable to other dishes.

You could, very easily, use the same recipe, but drop the wine, the Worcestershire, and the herbs. Add some cumin, paprika, chilli powder at the start, and beans towards the end, and garnish with chopped coriander/cilantro to make a simple chilli.

Or, ditch the wine, swap the Worcestershire and herbs for some ginger, cumin and garam masala, add peas at the end, and make a simple Keema Mutar curry.

The core of all three of those dishes (from three different continents!) is: Soften onion and garlic. Brown mince. Add tomatoes and cuisine-appropriate spices/herbs. Simmer. Add quick cooking veggies near the end.

If you treat recipes like this you learn techniques not just meals. Once you have a few techniques learned you'll have the confidence to improvise because you know the fundamentals will work.

Mise en Place

When you're feeling brave and trying something complex, or something you've never cooked before, try mise en place. This is the cheffy name for 'getting everything ready'. One of the most stressful bits of cooking a new recipe is when you get to, eg: "Step 8. Add the fish sauce", and you need to scroll back up the screen (if you're using a website or an app) to look at how much fish sauce you need, then find the fish sauce, then find a measuring spoon, then scrolling back up again because you've already forgotten how much fish sauce you need, etc.

Instead, you work your way through the list of ingredients and measure everything out before you start any cooking. If the recipe lists chopped onion, get that onion, chop it, stick it in a bowl ready for when it's needed. If multiple veggies are added at the same time, prepare them and put them in the same bowl. Where I live, takeaway Chinese food comes in little plastic tubs. I have a dozen or so of these that I use for this purpose. They're free, stackable, washable, and a good size for most ingredients.

This has three huge benefits. Firstly, you double check you have everything you need before you start cooking (and have time to google 'alternative to tomatillos' or whatever, or get someone to run to the store to pick up what you need). Secondly it's a lot easier to do all your veggie prep in one go, then meat prep in one go, and so on. And thirdly, it makes following the recipe so much more relaxed and easy because everything is ready to go and - if you've checked the recipe in advance as well - in the right order for when you need them. There's not much more stress in the kitchen than suddenly realising that you need to add an ingredient now that will take five or ten minutes to clean and prepare! Doing your mise en place makes the cooking feel almost like cheating it becomes so easy.

Bonus advice

Keep your chopping boards segregated! I have one that I only use, and always use, for raw meat. I never use any of the others for raw meat, only veggies, cooked meats, etc. You do not want to prepare a salad on the same chopping board you used to cut up your raw chicken.

Kind of a meta comment, but I find having a few good, physical cook books helps in several ways:

1. Gives you ideas about what to try/make
2. Gives you step by step (which you do not have to follow exactly )
3. And a really good one will explain why things work the way they do.

There are a lot out there from the OG Pepin's La Technique: https://archive.org/details/latechniquefunda0000pepi_p0v8

To the one I find most helpful for beginners and experts, Kenji's The Food Lab: https://archive.org/details/foodlabbetterhom0000lope

Here's an example of Kenji's voodoo: Ten minute three ingredient Mac & Cheese: https://www.seriouseats.com/ingredient-stovetop-mac-and-cheese-recipe This one scales up or down because you use exactly the same amount by weight of each of the three ingredients. Instant side dish; does not reheat though.

Good luck! Cooking can be a meditative experience if you let it. Healing even.