Indeed, and I hope every one who enjoys cooking also has that moment.
It’s also a skill I use to evaluate recipes online… and having those moments when I’m like… this isn’t going to work. I wonder if they ever actually cooked or baked this recipe because some of the recipes look like ideas instead of something someone actually made.
I’d helped out in the kitchen growing up but never really planned or made a full meal except breakfast, camping cooking, and grilled stuff. So I went off to grad school with an iron skillet, a few bad knives, and one stockpot all from a garage sale. The skillet and stockpot are still with me 30+ years later. The knives are long gone!
I’d seen what my mom did and I knew I was too broke to eat out all the time so I started experimenting. Pre-internet so I had to check out cookbooks from the library or copy recopies from the newspaper! Cooking had never been presented as anything hard and I’ve always been willing to try different things so it wasn’t a big deal.
My mom taught my siblings and me how to cook, but I can’t really say I learned then. I just didn’t put in the practice to cement what my mom taught. When I took it up later, I remembered some small lessons, but had to relearn the basics.
Reminds me of this, maybe some parents just push their kids away from duties cuz it’s faster to do it alone.
My mom taught me real basic stuff. I also learned some stuff from Martin Yan, from “Yan can cook!” on PBS.
Later, in college, I started watching Alton Brown, and iron chef (the real one), which dramatically expanded my knowledge of stuff.
Ways I’ve learned to cook:
It’s pain on the road to creating functional sustenance, not magic fun, for me. Which is sad because I come from a family of restaurant owners who were light footed in the kitchen and found food meaningful. I’m not sure what happened.
I’ve almost never worried about those issues. Everything I make is inspired by X so I feel free to change ingredients at any point.
Way too much Food Network back in the day, and living alone and thus needing to cook for myself. I never really sat down and “learned how to cook”, I understood basic knife skills and cooking techniques from TV and would just find recipes I thought sounded good and try them. The ones I liked stuck around and I’d experiment with them and do things a little differently each time to see how I could improve it. Just years of doing that has gotten me to the point where I’ve got a fair sized bank of culinary knowledge stuffed into my brain and so it’s gotten easier to try more advanced things. It’s a marathon, not a sprint!
For sure. You get there. I just got the principles beaten into me by making mistakes while others seem to get to where they can play and take inspiration right away. And by mistakes, I do mean bad tasting food. Not every ingredient or ratio works.
Man, I feel ya. I’ll add some:
So many lessons it’s hard to count. I’ve burned/ruined holiday meals as well as solo meals. I’ve over/under seasoned foods. I’ve made substitutions that ruined dishes.
Without failure we don’t learn.
If that tough lesson was not ‘take whatever amount of garlic was recommended and multiply by at least 3‘ then we may have an issue.
Many years ago I made a slow cooker variant of garlic chicken. Let’s just skip to the chase, it wasn’t edible at the end of my WAY over garlic addition.
yeah, my daughter did that too. Not very helpful then, but they improve! :-)
I feel the most important thing to learn is timing. The main reason I screwed up meals early on (and, tbh, later in life as well) is because the water for the pasta or rice took ages to get boiling, leaving me with a half undercooked, half overcooked dinner…
I have to say that is rather amazing. I’d say I have a bout 1% of that as my repertoire of dishes.
My mom wasn’t much into teaching us how to cook. Neither me nor my sister learned from her. I’m trying to instill some cooking skills into my daughter. She has been assisting in cooking and baking since the age of 3.
I can probably thank my partner for the breadth of my knowledge to some extent. She really doesn’t care for leftovers much, or specifically for eating the same thing each day, so I was encouraged not just to change it up week to week with long breaks before returning to a cuisine, but even to avoid too similar things for multiple meals in a row. That encouraged me to create week-long menus that combined many recipes to create novel serving options every couple of nights to keep things fresh while we did work through leftovers.
That first year on my own in the apartment, I probably ate red beans and rice 50% of the days I was in there, if not more. Love red beans and rice so, so much. Whereas she doesn’t like eating a bacon biscuit the day after we have pepperoni pizza, since “they’re both just pork on bread anyway.”
Necessity is the mother of invention and all that…
YouTube, Netflix… like the ability to watch people, real cooks not the fake ones, cook and talk about cooking in addition to cookbooks is so awesome right. I am hoping it makes it easier to learn and instill interest for those who start off just curious. The competition shows are fun too.
I loved helping my mom cook from a very young age. I’d stand on a chair next to the mixer when we were baking bread or making cookies and the like.
As I got older I loved watching cooking shows like Yan Can Cook or Caprial’s Kitchen on PBS. I remember really wanting to start learning to cook Chinese food and finding a great cookbook by, I think, Yan Kit So.
EDIT: I found the book! My older sister actually burned my copy and then bought a replacement for herself! We still make the kung pao chicken recipe in this book:
At that point I had taken on a lot of the cooking responsibilities for the family. Partly because of my mother’s health issues, but also because I just wanted to expand our typical family dinner menu.
Of course, when the Food Network came along with Good Eats, in particular, that taught me a ton more about cooking different kinds of food. Many of our family favorites started as Good Eats recipes.
So she really didn’t like your cooking?
Never got much exposure to cooking at home growing up, but when I was 14, I worked in a deli for the summer, learning how to prep, make soups and sandwiches, and other deli stuff. The prep work lessons (onions, lettuce, tomatoes, etc) still stick with me.
Later, in college, one of my roommates was a good cook as his step-father owned a restaurant so he taught a bit.
After college, I lived alone and traveled a lot in SE Asia for a decade. I’m also cheap, so I never liked paying for takeout when home, so I just cooked for myself. OJT, but I wasn’t very picky so I didn’t develop much. Beans and rice were a staple, also bbq chicken, frozen veggies.
After getting married, my wife took over the cooking (for good reason), but I still cooked 2-3 times per week. When I moved into management about 6 years ago, I started to cook more (and also get into simple carpentry) as I needed creative outlets. Still learning, making new things more often now.