I hate cooking. I am very good at it because I do so much of it, and I don't want to eat terrible food. I LOVE and enjoy baking. It's my happy place.

Anonymous wrote:I do. I didn’t pick it up until married, and cooks illustrated helped teach me. I like chemistry, so that helps.Baking and cooking is essentially science. The right recipes makes a world of difference. Try cooks illustrated books or magazine, and America’s test kitchen.
Once you get the skills, you could try simply in season cookbook. Beware, many recipes on line and many cookbooks are pretty awful. But if you have the skills you can fix them.

Kind of. As someone who doesn't like baking much though generally competent, I think baking is a science where you are generally best with following the rules but I enjoy cooking a lot more because you can kind of shift as you go and, if you're generally skilled, that's what makes you a good cook. My favorite thing with cooking, forr example, is to read like 8 recipes for the same dish and then just...go with what I feel and it normally works out well (ie says 2 cloves garlic, I will do 4!) But baking is much more exact.

I enjoyed it before kids. I grew up cooking and cooked in restaurants. Trying to please picky kids and the grind of daily meals has taken all the fun out of it.

I love cooking. I cook and bake. I like recreating restaurant entrees at home. Sometimes I nail it, sometimes it’s a fail. It’s still fun. I love baking bread, cake, desserts and Christmas cookies. I also love trying different cuisines. Asian, Indian, Mexican, German, etc.

I cook 4 days a week, go out once and 2 nights leftovers.

I’ve never enjoyed it and was never great at it. It was just something I had to do for my family. My kids are grown now and both (son and daughter, plus spouses) are excellent cooks. I’m a widow now, so I entertain by taking everyone out to a restaurant. I rarely cook much for myself.

I don't enjoy cooking. I did it well enough to have good family meals on the table when our kids were growing up. But prekids and now as an empty nesters, DH and I each handle our meals independently. For me, it's so nice now, to just have yogurt for dinner and mealtime is done.

Anonymous wrote:What items do you like making? What are you good at making or you think you are good at making?

Advice for the novice?

How did you initially start cooking?

Or do you find cooking as an unpleasant chore?

If you have kids, do you know that you will make, prep or buy a little less than 20,000 "meals" between kid's birth and age 18...

I love cooking, when I have time. Unfortunately, we all need to eat whether I have time or not. Most of our meals are home cooked, and have been since before our kids were born. I was cooking with my mom when I was young, and did the same with our kids - they dumped ingredients, mixed, eventually measured, and cooked and baked themselves.

It's not hard, even if you don't know what you are doing, buy a basic cookbook and follow directions. Cook what you like to eat. With kids, who can be picky (we had one who was vegetarian for a few years), it's best to be flexible. For example please, quessadillas are a super easy meal. You can throw cheese in a tortilla and cook. You can make it cheese and beans. Cheese and refried beams. Juat refried beans. I did spinach and feta sometimes. And, if it was when we had leftover chicken, you cam shred that and add it to those who want it. Same with pizza, you can buy dough ready to go, and have everyone do their own toppings. With tacos it's similar - you can do chicken or chop meat or pork, and make bowls with cheese, tomato, corn, beans, lettuce sour cream, and have options of tortillas, hard shells, or, chips that the toppings go on. Spaghetti and meatballs, you can take a shortcut and buy pre-made meatballs, then just make the past and use Raos sauce. You can use zoodles if someone doesn't like carbs. These are all more putting together items that cooking, but with working parents and busy kids, that's sometimes all you have time for.

Keeping romaine lettuce, croutons and fresh parmesean cheese in the house means you can always make Ceasar salad - do it on the night after you have chicken, and chicken ceasar salad can be a meal.

Pork tenderloin is easy to season and cook (use your meat thermometer), same for steaks and even grilled chicken. Thighs are more flavorful and more forgiving than chicken breast, which can dry out if overcooked. Steam broccoli or green beans or whatever vegetables your kids will eat (or roast them if you have time), add pasta or potato or quinoa or rice and you have a meal.

The kids always helped me make and distribute Christmas cookies, as well as make holiday meal desserts (we host), so they learned baking too.

Of our 2 kids (one boy, one girl), both cook, and one really likes to bake. They are both in college, living in group homes, not in the dorms, and both cook a lot

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not for the last almost two decades - I was never a good cook but tried, and then had to move to a home with VERY little counter space and a poorly laid-out kitchen, very final storage, no dishwasher, small oven, etc. So I don't like being in the kitchen. Growing up I had to cook dinner for the family once a week starting at age 7, and my weirdly passive-aggressive mother would always either claim to be too sick to eat, or eat what I made and then claim it made her sick. So that didn't really instill much confidence in me.

Now in my 40's, if I had a kitchen that worked well, I would love to make matzo ball soup. I could eat that every day. You can freeze portions of it (even the matzo ball) and just defrost as you want it.

This makes a huge difference. I just moved to a house that has basically an ideal kitchen (the couple who built it both worked for an architecture firm, and the house is more functional than I knew one could be), and it really does make an enormous difference.

Yep, I totally know. This is the worst place I've ever lived in my entire life. Being stuck sucks.

I enjoy cooking and love trying new things. I also enjoy eating healthy as opposed to eating out or heating up processed foods. I tend to get ambitious and try too many new things on the same weekend or in succession so I have to temper it with old standbys that are easy for me, I don’t need the recipe, etc. But yeah if you are at all interested in eating a healthy diet either you have to cook from scratch or someone has to cook for you.

21 meals a week to plan, prep and hope little eaters will eat can be a lot

No I don’t enjoy cooking.
I feel like nutrition is more important than whether youre having a hot meal sitting at the dinner table every night.
Last night we weren’t very hungry so had a snack plate for dinner each. Basically cheese/crackers fruit/raw veggies. 5 mins of prep. We do similar about once a week.

Sometimes. I grew up on a lot of processed, pre-made food. My mom was an amazing mom but not a particularly great cook. I started teaching myself to cook in my 20s but there was a steep learning curve. Some of my beginning marriage days meals were fairly comical because they were so bad.

These days, I think I'm pretty good at meal planning, rotating menu items and figuring out quick but healthy-ish meals. It taps into my creative side sometimes but some weeks I'm exhausted and it just feels like a chore. My husband will eat anything, my kids are picky and I have a lot of food restrictions so the day to day feels like an annoying puzzle trying to figure out what we need in the kitchen to make everyone happy.

Anonymous wrote:Not for the last almost two decades - I was never a good cook but tried, and then had to move to a home with VERY little counter space and a poorly laid-out kitchen, very final storage, no dishwasher, small oven, etc. So I don't like being in the kitchen. Growing up I had to cook dinner for the family once a week starting at age 7, and my weirdly passive-aggressive mother would always either claim to be too sick to eat, or eat what I made and then claim it made her sick. So that didn't really instill much confidence in me.

Now in my 40's, if I had a kitchen that worked well, I would love to make matzo ball soup. I could eat that every day. You can freeze portions of it (even the matzo ball) and just defrost as you want it.

This makes a huge difference. I just moved to a house that has basically an ideal kitchen (the couple who built it both worked for an architecture firm, and the house is more functional than I knew one could be), and it really does make an enormous difference.

I don't like cooking regular things, but I do enjoy baking at times. Although I'm not actually a fan of eating baked goods -- I've never really liked bread and I don't have a sweet tooth.

Anonymous wrote:I love it. It’s a creative outlet, which is a good thing, because it’s a necessity. Re: daily family dinner being a chore - yes, but you can make it easier on yourself by having a pretty standard roster of weeknight recipes that are lower-effort, and save the fancy/time-consuming recipes for the weekend.

Such as?