A howdy hello to everyone,
Getting older has made me realize the deficits in my cooking skills. I was a very picky eater growing up, and started to widen my palate so that I wouldn’t be condemned to eating some form of bread with cheese for my entire life. I love fruits and vegetables, so there’s no problem here. Grains are a bit difficult because of their texture.
I am completely dogshit at cooking. Whenever I try a new recipe, I either burn or undercook the food, resulting in about an hour wasted of poor planning.
This may involve walking back and forth around the kitchen getting ingredients as needed, forgetting to do a step, or forgetting an ingredient that is sitting on the counter away from me.
My motor skills are sometimes clumsy with cutting, so oftentimes the vegetables and fruit are cut too thick, or not to the point where the recipe expects them. When I made aloo gobi, my cauliflower was too large, the potatoes were undercooked, and the other veggies were just a pile of slop. Sometimes other dishes will not be entirely cooked and other parts will be burnt.
Oftentimes I might hate the taste of what I’ve made, so ultimately I will act to not eat anything because I don’t want to waste money cooking then going out. I have been working out and live a much more active lifestyle compared to how sedentary I was in university. Walking around 10 hours a day has made me truly realize the feeling of hunger. An emotion I normally never felt due to stomach problems and perpetual nausea.
I am very good at cooking breakfast foods, but do not want to eat French toast or Pancakes every single day. I’d like to add a broader spectrum to my breakfasts as well, as it is a quite small subset. I tried learning the cookiebookie latex package to write a cookbook as I went, but I gave up on trying to get it working. Formatting documents is an entirely different post.
This is turning into a rant, but for those of you whose special interests are cooking and who have found a spectrum of foods that are nutritious and filling, what advice would you have for me? What cookware do you recommend? Is there a set of recipes you think would be good to introduce cooking techniques? My end goal would be to cook with mostly anything I have on hand to turn it into something delicious and nutritious. Protein rich meals, vitamins, minerals, calories, etc.
Someone said a slow cooker - I can also add a pressure cooker. Just add the ingredients, seal it, walk away, 30m-1h later your soup/stew/porridge or even rice is ready. No need to overthink it.
Cooking needs some practice and a bit of patience. I only learned to cook in my late 20s. In time I learned how long a particular ingredient needs to sit in the oven and at which temperature (it’s almost always 30m at 180-200°C), and which spice goes with which meat. I use a lot of canned veggies and readymade spice mixes - curry, chili con carne, they are so much easier this way. Also, make sure there is enough salt, the lack of salt can really make any food bland. Oh, and butter. You can never go wrong with butter. Fry your eggs in butter (lower temp, it burns quickly), add it to your boiled rice with a pinch of salt, it’s really versatile and adds a butt load of flavor.