I fucking suck at cooking
I highly recommend Good Eats with Alton Brown - it explains why you do each step in recipes, gives some options for variations, and there are some episodes dedicated primarily to basics (knife skills, keeping knives sharp, cooking with kids, safety, etc). You don’t have to make every recipe, but it’s interesting to watch even recipes you don’t think you’ll make. Keep watching until you find something good, then you have a video of doing it with explanations, plus his website and books have step by step instructions. Watching will show you how to do a lot of techniques for different things - doing them will help you remember them.
Some of my recommendations that I still make often:
Tomato sauce - easy to make (you prep your veggies, drain tomatoes, then basically just stir a pot occasionally and stir a pan in the oven, then combine and run it through your blender/food processor), it’s good on basically everything (pasta, eggs, pizza, base for soups, etc), and keeps in the freezer for at least a year. I like to add a lot of fresh basil to mine when it’s in season. https://altonbrown.com/recipes/pantry-friendly-tomato-sauce/
Baked Mac and cheese - tasty, creamy, flavorful, and easy. Cook your pasta, shred cheese, whisk a pot while adding stuff to it and letting it form your roux (sauce base), add all your cheese, add pasta, put in a dish, add a stirred together topping, and bake. The recipe itself tells you when to add stuff so it’s not a guess or anything, the episode is good too. (If you prefer stovetop Mac and cheese, equally easy and the same episode does that too, easy to find the recipe on the website as well) https://altonbrown.com/recipes/baked-macaroni-and-cheese/
Scrambled eggs - the episode is well worth watching at least once, and the eggs turn out super fluffy and tasty. (The harissa and herbs are optional, but recommended if you already have them or want to jazz it up) https://altonbrown.com/recipes/20-second-scrambled-eggs/
Just remember, especially if you’re new to cooking or trying to get better: it’s okay to make mistakes! Don’t get upset if you mess something up, figure out what you did wrong and try again later. If you mess up your meal for the night and can’t recover it, fall back on leftovers or takeout or frozen food, but don’t give up on cooking.
Also, if cooking for a special occasion - don’t make it for the first time for the event, make it at least once beforehand as practice and to make sure the recipe itself makes sense and is good
Wait, what is this about microwaving pop tarts? Don’t y’all have toasters?!
nah OP, you go try making that triple layer cheesy bread
though i’d perhaps encourage you to make it a single layer cheesy break, as to not get discouraged and have something yummy to eat when you’re done even if you kinda give up by the end
your cooking journey has to start somewhere! might as well start with something you’d like to eat
Honestly OP, about ten years ago I sucked at cooking too. Then one day I just got excited about being a better cook, and that was enough to make me keep on trying until I did. Since then I’ve managed to help two other people who knew literally nothing about cooking get to the point where they can absolutely wow people with some of their dishes.
It all comes down to this; learn one meal. That’s it. Just one thing that you can do well. Mac and cheese. Spaghetti bollognaise. Fried chicken. A grilled pork chop with green beans. Garlic bread. Just pick that one thing, and get good at it. Then you pick another thing. And another. And before you know it, you’ll not only have a catalogue of dishes that you can confidently cook, but also dish will have taught you techniques that you’ll find yourself reusing when you learn the next, and so the learning process itself becomes faster and easier. Eventually, you’ll look at a recipe and just immediately think “Oh, right, I know how to do all that. Easy.”
But how do you get there? I find that recipes are a terrible way to learn to cook. Video content is much more helpful, because a video can break down technique for you. Binging With Babish is so popular because he’s exceptional at this; every video he tries to introduce at least one new technique to his audience. Ethan Chleblowski is also really good at getting into the how and why of cooking, as well as just the what. If you’re vegan or vegetarian Derek Sarno makes excellent content. For baking Ann Reardon’s How To Cook That is wonderful. Joshua Weissman is really fun. Kenji Lopez Alt is an absolute master of breaking down the science of cooking (and also just doling out fun and easy late night recipes). And despite the name and humorous tone, You Suck At Cooking really does offer good cooking ideas.
Watch a whole lot of this content. Just bounce through videos until you land on a recipe that makes you go “Yeah, I want to try that.” Then, after you’ve had a few cracks at it, start looking up that meal on n YouTube and finding other videos about the same thing. Compare and try out different techniques. Look for where people agree and disagree an try everything until you find something that really works for you. If, try as you might, you just can’t seem to make a dish work, move on to a different one (but only after really giving it a few goes). Sometimes you have to come back to something later, once you have more of your basic technique down.
Eventually, you will get good at one thing. And then another thing. And another. And as you do that, your confidence will grow exponentially. Soon enough, you’ll feel at home in the kitchen.
Baking is the best place to start. You often just measure your ingredients precisely and then mix them for simple recipes.
None of this “a pinch of” bullshit. How many grams in a pinch you vague fuck!?!
The answer to “a pinch of salt” is that you “season to taste”. Literally, taste it, then add more if it needs more. Your pinch and my pinch will be different, because you and I will like different amounts of salt.
And it’s actually nearly impossible to find “a pinch of salt” in a recipe these days. Most recipes will give you exact measures for herbs and spices.
Kinda hard when it’s a baked recipe. Bread recipes especially seem to have a habit of pinch measurements, and yet you can’t taste it before baking
Which is ironic given that the previous commenter was extolling how scientific and precise baking is, and how you never have to deal with vague measurements.
Baking - especially bread - is in fact incredibly fussy. It’s hugely dependent on factors like humidity and temperature, and just what mood the yeast is in that day.
But if you are struggling with bread recipes that include vague measurements for salt, generally 5g of salt for every 250g of flour should be alright.
Also avoid bread recipes that measure flour by volume (cups). Look for ones that measure by weight instead. Much more reliable.
Baking is the worst place to start for a beginner, because it reauires more precision in ingredient quantity and technique. There’s little room for error.
Whereas with cooking a simple dish like pasta or rice, you have more leeway with quantities and cooking times and preparation. And wayy more room for error. You can easily experiment with more/less of ingredients because it won’t affect the overall dish and flavour much.
Whereas with baking, dough for example is hell. You need an almost astronomical precision unless you want to glue your entire kitchen, or make it too runny, or too floury. Baking also becomes more difficult wihout measurement devices, whereas with cooking trusting something loose like a cup or just eyeballing isn’t catastrophic.
Also baking is heavily dependent on factors beyond many peoples control, such as the humidity and temperature in your home, or the quality of your oven. Cookies are fine, everyone should take a crack at them, but anything with yeast is a fussy little bitch that will fuck you over just for fun.
Making simple bread is very easy and hard to fuck up as long as you follow the goddamn instructions. It’s an excellent place to start. It’s where I started and I know how to make some very good stuff now. It’s a lot easier to get started than many fear.
Want to immediately crowd please while still doing dead simple baking? Club med bread. Piss easy bread that people tend to love and think is much more complicated.
Assuming OOP does infact just microwave poptarts and relies on other ready-mades, I don’t think they have all the necessary equipment for baking.
I just think it’s a tougher place to start in because while you get exact measurements, there’s more nuance and less room for improvising.
I tried baking something (pigs in blankets) for the first time after having cooked for years. If you are not fully prepared for every micro-disaster that can strike during dough making, your life will be hell. Cooking pasta only has the prerequisite of knowing how to boil water, and reading the time for how much to boil the noodles.
You can follow the instructions on bread, quantities and time to bake, and yet there’s still stuff you have to account for and know from experience.
I know it’s not the answer you want but really that’d mean whatever you feel is right like a pinch of salt just means add the amount of salt that makes it taste good to you which would be much better written as salt to taste but that’s what they mean generally same applies with anything that’s a small undefined vague amount of an item that’s just there for flavour really I know that’s not super helpful if you’re not good at cooking and don’t know what is the right amount for you though it’s sort of just something you have to learn the intuition for what’d be right for a dish for your taste buds :/
I don’t know. Every ingredient can be adjusted to your personal taste, the point of quantities is to have a meaningful starting point. I’d rather read a 1/4 teaspoon than a pinch. Besides, a pinch is pretty hard to reproduce with any consistency.
(Also why not add
a pincha 1/4 teaspoon of punctuation to your prose my bro? My head is out of breath.
)
I hate punctuation and I’d guess the thinking is the recipe author doesn’t even know them self what they used and also it’s like a permission thing again could be clearer by saying to taste but maybe the thinking is if they say a ¼ tsp people will add exactly that and be rigid where as you say a shake of it and they’ll decide for themselves how much they want
You suck at cooking yeah you totally suck
Microwaving the Pop Tarts is your first mistake: they should be toasted!
They should stay in the store.
They should never have been harvested from the tree to begin with.
Instructions unclear, how do I put out a fire?
Well get on it then. You will only improve by cooking / baking a lot (and learning from your mistakes 😔)
Pop tarts can overheat so fast
