s/o off how to make dinner every night. How to become a better (at least decent) cook??

[Anonymous]

I like America Test Kitchen "Best 30 Minute Meal". Watch them on PBS when you can - after 35+ years that is how my mom advanced beyond protein, starch and veggie, rinse, repeat.

[Anonymous]

I'm trying to learn to be a decent cook, too, OP, so I understand where you're coming from. I think there's great advice on this thread. Reading cookbooks and watching ATK and Alton Brown and Nigella. All good.

For me, I needed to develop a goal. There are many ways to learn to cook. You can find a series of recipes and practice them and become very good at them. You can pick a technique and master that. I decided that I wanted to develop "cooking sense", a way to understand ingredients and sort of figure out, knowing the ingredients, what goes with what to make a good dinner. I also wanted to be able to build something around a vegetable that came in my Washington Green Grocers box, because I hate to waste anything.

I can't say I'm there, yet, but here's some resources that helped me attack those goals.

Deborah Madison- Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
Mark Bittman- How to Cook Everything and How to cook Everything Vegetarian

These both helped me to understand individual vegetables, the kinds of cooking that works best with them, and how to make substitutions. I don't eat exclusively vegetarian, but find that I cook to suit my freshest ingredients and these are usually vegetables.

In order to improve my skills with meats, casseroles, or other complicated dishes, I usually read several recipes on the internet and sort of glean the proportions, cooking temps, and other general info, and then I make myself create it without sticking to a recipe.

For these adventures, and for inspiration, I like to look at these blogs:

America's Test Kitchen
Smitten Kitchen
Veggin
Alton Brown
My Life Runs on Food
Herbavoracious
Love and Olive Oil
Simply Scratch

and sort of

The Year in Food
Pass the Sushi

(both are kind of impractical to me.)

The other thing I keep in mind is that I only need to learn one thing at a time. So, if I'm working on an interesting veg dish, I let the rice and protein be easy. I don't try to invent or learn whole meals with complicated parts at the same time. I hope this makes sense. I find I learn better one challenge at a time, and as long as I keep my goal of learning "cooking sense", I'm getting there.

Hope this helps you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:fourth, start slow. I think good cooks have a feel for ingredients and how food works - they dont rely on recipes. As my aunt who is a professional food person says, 'cooking is an art; baking is a science.' you need to have the tools and understand the basics to master an art.

it can be fun!

So that explains why I like baking and my husband is an actual cook - I'm a scientist and he's an English major. I never get why he can't seem to get that baki requires precision, yet am always flabbergasted when he can just pull a meal together from whatever's in the fridge (a skill totally beyond me

Back to OP - we're recently started using The Fresh 20 for meal planning, and it's been great to help me improve my cooking, The recipes have basically all been delicious, and while it does take a bit longer than my standard heat-pasta-in-a-pot, I have the time to focus on the cooking portion because the meal planning / grocery list part is taken care of. It has definitely worked to improve the quality of our meals and reduce food waste while simultaneously reducing the meal planning / "what's for dinner?" angst.

Admittedly if I won the lottery I'd still hire a personal chef as cooking will never be my thing. But since I don't see that happening, this is a good compromise in the meantime.