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

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

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[quote=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.
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