Cooking: where to start?

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

"so you're autistic and want to cook"

yeah I can't really argue with that description.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

Highly recommend watching this show presented by the esteemed James May. He's a dolt with cooking but should give you the confidence to start your own dishes.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Most grocery stores nowadays have meals (usually in the front) where you can just stick them in the oven, or you can also check the frozen aisle for "skillet meals" (basically putting frozen stuff in a pan and letting it cook).

If you want to learn about different types of food you can cook, you can read The Joy of Cooking (I'm most familiar with the most-popular 1975 edition but the later editions should be fine). You can always buy a copy but borrowing it (from your mother, library, etc.) or pirating it might be better in this age. Read it, learn from it, get inspired.

 

[Aiōn]

An important aspect of cooking a meal is learning to time everything so it will be ready simultaneously. Meat needs to rest so this gives you time to prepare your accompaniments, rice can be strained and left to sit with the lid covering for a few minutes while you're getting everything else ready. Putting your plates in a warm oven for a few minutes before you serve is a nice idea.

Mise en place (preparing all of your ingredients beforehand), especially if you've never make a particular dish before makes things easier. Baking is more exact and you will need to follow the recipe closely. There are simple rules like don't open the oven door when a cake is rising, over-mixing a cake will make it heavy etc. Read through a recipe from start to finish before you begin.

When you are cooking, taste as you go, keep your workspace clean and take care to keep raw and cooked foods seperate. Try to avoid reheating foods more than once and if something should be refrigerated, don't leave it sitting out for longer than 2 hours once it has cooled.

Practice makes perfect!

 

[AnOminous]

Mise en place (preparing all of your ingredients beforehand), especially if you've never make a particular dish before makes things easier.

It also prevents one of my least favorite things, that is, you are already cooking something and you suddenly realize holy fuck there's a critical ingredient missing, or I forgot where I put it, and then I get all discombobulated and spill things and tard rage.

Just make sure you have everything you need ready already. If you're really autistic, put the ingredients in some kind of clockwise circle so you can use them in order.

Do your prep in advance.

 

[Squanto Airi]

I'd say start with a soup, since you'll learn knife cuts, though you can easily get ingredients that are pre chopped and cut if you aren't as confident in your skills. Once you gain experience and confidence in the kitchen, you can improve on soup recipes, or tweak it once you learn which flavors you think work well together.

Example:
Chicken soup the beginner way: get the prechopped mirepoix (celery, carrot, onion), precooked and precut chicken, dried noodles, premade chicken broth, dried seasonings.

Intermediate: Whole onions, carrot, and celery, whole chicken breasts, dried noodles, chicken base, fresh rosemary and thyme.

Advanced: Whole onion, carrot, celery, rosemary, and thyme all from your garden, roasted chicken that's been shredded, and its carcass used to make homemade stock for the soup, freshly made noodles.

 

[SaltyFanta]

I'd suggest doing a cheeseburger. Insanely easy for something people tend to order out. It's not a particularly wholesome or healthy meal, but something helpful about doing it at least once is that you'll see through the value fast food claims to have. It's easy to make a cheeseburger, it's cheap to make a cheeseburger and you can easily make a cheeseburger about as good or better than any fast food place.

 

[Troonos]

#1 Tip:

The only thing you should cook on High on the stovetop is water.

It blows my mind how many new college-aged kids who now have to cook for themselves try to cook anything on the highest setting.

Most things need medium-high to medium-low heat. Simmering or anything that needs to slowly reduce needs actual low heat. Even searing a steak should be on 7/8, not High.

 

[Dagoth AMOGUS]

Cooking is an art. And all artists refuse to create something bad. Your first few meals will suck. You just have to get that out of the way and not get discouraged.

 

[OrionBalls]

rice can be strained

Please explain this statement.

OP, Cooking at home is easy. Just don't be afraid of fucking up. You're going to fuck up. But practice makes better. Keep at it, and if you aren't comfortable with something new, follow the directions precisely the first time. Read it through a few times, if you have to. Eventually, you will have enough techniques mastered to just use a recipe as a guideline. Concerning seasoning, it comes down to what you prefer, but really good food has a balance of sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and savory.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

Couple of tips:

• Clean the kitchen - having everything organized before you start helps tons.
• When done, take a look at the kitchen and consider reorganizing so the things you used are closer to where you used them
• Do not try to "take it slow" by reducing heat when not called for - cooking an egg on low heat is way harder than cooking it on high. When in doubt go hot and adjust.
• Pay attention to what stove and pan they're using if watching a video - cast iron reacts to heat changes much slower than a pan on induction, for example.
• If you buy cheap shit from thrift stores you don't even have to clean the pan/pot if a disaster happens, just toss it.
• There is ZERO SHAME in starting with hamburglar helper boxes and other such things.
• Recipes will often have you doing three or four things at once and then combine the results. Don't do this at first - you can afford to do it one at a time and reheat a bit if necessary. It is possible to make spaghetti by boiling the noodles and cooking the meat and making the sauce all at once but if you've never tried before, you will probably drop the ball on one of the parts.
• If you fuck up real bad toss it in the trash and order dominos and try again later.
• Anything on a outdoor BBQ or grill is going to be damn forgiving.

 

[Aiōn]

Please explain this statement.

I meant placed in a strainer and drained, rather than leaving the rice to sit in the water after cooking., Then you can put the sieve over the pot you used to cook it in with the lid covering to keep it warm.

 

[I'm Retarded?]

Add chili oil to a bowl of rice and you have not a bad breakfast.

Also, "seasoning" is a scam pushed by black people.

 

[Idiotron]

If your parents ever cooked for you properly, ask them for recipes.
You already know how the meals are supposed to look and taste like so you can try recreating them.
That's how i started.

 

[AnOminous]

Watch Jack Scalfani videos. Don't do anything he does.

 

[BongoMongo]

Invest in good quality seasonings utensils and oils. Steer well clear of non-stick pans and seed oils.

Smoked sea salt is awesome.

Don't be afraid of making mistakes as well. Errors are all just part of the learning curve.

RE: spaghetti. Cook your spaghetti separate to the saucem but when draining the spaghetti, do so over your saucepan, and add a tablespoon full of pasta water to the spaghetti sauce.

Batch cooking is awesome, and is well worth it. The feeling of having a few good homecooked meals in your freezer for when you're feeling ill or time pressed is great.

Oh also if you're lacking a knife sharpener but your knives need sharpening, wad up some aluminium foil and very carefully, run the blade of your knife along the ball (very fucking carefully).

 

[Cat tit bingo]

Start slow, don't jump into super complex stuff till your ready. Get the basic down first, a nice cut of protein, an oil, and some basic seasoning will get you to a nice meal. You gotta keep making the same thing to learn what works and what doesn't. Once your confident Start advancing, garlic powder is fine when your mainly focusing on cooking the meat right but eventually step it up to actual garlic and after that learn to make a good garlic butter. Every step you learn we'll will be applicable for hundreds and hundreds of other situations so get those basic down.
Also get a thermometer, sure some people can reliability just use the visuals or the feeling of one of dozen parts of there arm but until then use the sure thing so you don't get food poison, it really fucking sucks

 

[sadbird]

If you can cook spaghetti, you already have the basic fundamentals to cook just about anything. Just find recipes online, buy the ingredients, and follow the directions.

Cooking is not rocket science.

Spaghetti is probably a good lesson in following directions, and is recommended as a foot in the door starting point. But you won't learn anything else other than making cooking a habit.

Boil an egg

Eggs are where it's at. If you can learn how to cook eggs regardless of whether it's fried or scrambled, it will help to master basic temperature control, and even if you screw up at worst you'll have something upsetting to eat but usually not inedible. Eyeballing is also a valuable skill in cooking, since there are many times heat, time, or consistency becomes fly by wire. Does something say it has to go for an hour but looks on the verge of overcooked at 45? It's things like that.

 

[Inside your walls]

I suggest this book because it has everything, from making bread dough to a basic pizza.


The recipes are also available online too.

 

[AnOminous]

Invest in good quality seasonings utensils and oils. Steer well clear of non-stick pans and seed oils.

I'm going to disagree on that. Stay away from "canola" (rapeseed) and most of the stuff generically marketed as "vegetable oil," e.g. corn, cottonseed, soybean, etc.

Peanut oil and grapeseed oil are top notch though.

However, definitely do not shy away from lard, beef tallow, bacon grease, butter and other perfectly cromulent animal fats that have been defamed and demonized by the seed oil lobbies.

Eggs are where it's at. If you can learn how to cook eggs regardless of whether it's fried or scrambled, it will help to master basic temperature control, and even if you screw up at worst you'll have something upsetting to eat but usually not inedible.

And if you screw up you can just pretend you actually intended to make scrambled.

The first way I made eggs as a kid when I was completely incapable of flipping them over for over easy without breaking them (and I still suck at it and have maybe a 90% success rate at best):

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/140333/shirred-eggs/

People also seem to find it impressive although it's yet another of those things I found at about age 10 in the Betty Crocker cookbook. So a literal 10 year old can do it. Impossible to fuck up short of literally just forgetting to take them out of the oven.

Spaghetti is probably a good lesson in following directions, and is recommended as a foot in the door starting point. But you won't learn anything else other than making cooking a habit.

Another of my very early actual dinners was spaghetti, and just doctoring a jarred sauce like Newman's Own by adding more tomatoes, fresh or canned, garlic, and very thinly sliced kielbasa fried to a crisp.

It's well worth making your own sauce, though, because almost all jarred sauces have WAY too much sugar including the deplorable high fructose corn syrup.

Batch cooking is awesome, and is well worth it. The feeling of having a few good homecooked meals in your freezer for when you're feeling ill or time pressed is great.

And this is also where your money saving comes in. Some people, or as I prefer to call them, retards, claim that it's more expensive to cook yourself, because they are so dumb that the one time they tried cooking, they bought every ingredient and then used maybe a tenth of it and the rest spoiled, for one meal.

If you cook simple stuff for yourself in batches, though, you will often find yourself having multiple entire, custom-made exactly according to your personal preferences, better than you'd get in a cheap restaurant meals for less than a dollar each. Even in current year economy. Or where you save enough by making it yourself that the expensive cut of meat you used is basically free.